“Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy — the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence,” noted Norman Podhoretz. I agree. My experience gained in idea projects done with THINKERGY suggests that systematic innovation is both a science and an art.

Today, let’s first talk about the science. The literature on problem solving and creativity emphasizes the importance of following a systematic thinking process, and introduces various models such as the classic Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process. When we do an idea project with THINKERGY, we also follow a systematic, sequential creative process that we call X-IDEA. Our proprietary creative process was developed and fine-tuned in over 30 idea projects over the past three years aiming to help businesses to systematically produce innovation results.

Our X-IDEA Creative Process is a systematic thinking process that is universally applicable to all areas of innovation. It delivers superb results both for idea projects of a more strategic nature (such as Strategy Innovation and Business Model Innovation), and for more operative idea projects in areas such as product innovation, service innovation, experience design, solution design, or brand/image design. Our Creative Process consists of five main stages, each of which is represented by a letter in the acronym X-IDEA that describe the actions to take at each stage.

X — eXploration: In stage X, first eXpress your initial perception of your creative challenge, which is either a perceived problem or an opportunity for your business. For example, an airline with declining sales of economy class seats could frame their initial challenge as follows: “How to improve customer satisfaction of our economy class passengers?” Next, eXpress your knowledge about the situation. List all the available facts and evidence to specify your familiar knowledge terrain. Then, eXpress what you do not yet know about the situation, thus acknowledging and marking your knowledge frontier. Thereafter, eXtract additional information to close the identified knowledge gaps, and eXplore your unfamiliar knowledge terrain to find more knowledge gaps and uncover perceptual blind spots. Here, you use powerful eXploration tools (such as power questions, perspective shifts, visualization tools, and reality checks) to gain novel insights on your challenge.

Your objective behind all these efforts is to gain a deeper understanding of what really is the problem (or the opportunity) you face. Only then are you ready to eXpress your deepened understanding in your final challenge statement. Experience suggests that in two-thirds of cases, the initial challenge statement is later reframed in a better new challenge statement. In our previous example, the exploration might lead to the insight that satisfaction is lowest on longer flights. So a better way to eXpress the final challenge could be: “How to create novel experiences for economy class passengers on long-haul flights?”

I — Ideation: The second Stage, I, is all about generating ideas. Here, you Ideate and Imagine new raw ideas for your challenge. Make an effort to generate as many raw ideas as possible in a given period of time. “The object is to spur as many ideas as possible because perhaps one in 1,000 will turn out to fit,” noted Art Fry, 3M’s inventor of Post-it Notes. So when we facilitate a company through an Idea Project with THINKERGY, we make sure that a group of ten people creates at least one thousand raw ideas in three hours of Ideation. We do this by engaging the help of classic creativity techniques (such as Brainstorming, Random Word, or Metaphors), our self-made THINKERGY Idea Tools and our special facilitation methods.

D — Development: In the third Stage D, your first job is to Discover intriguing raw ideas within the flood of raw ideas that you’ve ideated. Then, you Develop those into meaningful and relevant ideas for your challenge by combining and improving on your raw ideas. Our special THINKERGY Development Tools and Methods help our clients to successfully accomplish this important job.

E — Evaluation: In Stage E, we first Evaluate the developed great ideas using Evaluation Tools such as Force Field Analysis. Usually, you will find out that most really good ideas still have some drawbacks and obstacles to overcome. Therefore, apply Idea Enhancement Tools (like our Fix-the-Bugs-Lotus Blossom) to mitigate or eliminate all those negative aspects. Finally, Elect the most relevant, promising ideas that indicate a high idea potential and implementation feasibility.

A — Action: In the final Stage A, you take Action to bring your best ideas to life. Here focus first on the Act — i.e., on how to effectively sell the value and key benefits of your idea to critical supporters (such as superiors or possible financiers). Then, direct the support gained toward Activating your ideas by specifying the key implementation parameters in a project activation plan.

So much for the science. In two weeks, learn more about the art of systematic innovation.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2008. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 13 March 2008.