Innovative thinking is a structured problem-solving approach that aims to find dramatic solutions to overcome current limitations. It involves setting boundaries, depersonalizing discussions, and limiting group sizes to avoid production blocking. The approach requires accurate information, involvement from everyone, and setting deadlines for implementation.
Innovative thinking is a type of structured problem solving, halfway between free association and brainstorming, and planned approaches to finding new solutions through controlled goal setting and creative trial and error. Companies try to employ innovative thinking to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals or to develop new products and services to take profits to a new level. The underlying motivation is to find dramatic solutions to overcome current rather than incremental limitations.
The revolutionary insight is popularly known as a “eureka moment” or the eureka effect, named after the 200 BC Greek scientist Archimedes, who, as legend has it, discovered a method for measuring the volume of irregular shapes while sitting in his chair. bath. Cicero, the famous Roman philosopher of the 100 BC period, later referred to the principle as “afflatus” or inspiration, which was believed to be a divine gift from the gods. Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine’s 20th-century study of complex systems and irreversibility led to the scientific understanding that innovative thinking is based on natural states of change and decay in open systems with free energy, such as people and companies that have for a time a unlimited potential. to grow.
In the later decades of the 1980s and 1990s, Western business culture often encouraged a type of group problem solving known as brainstorming, which was seen as a way to create revolutionary methods of thinking outside of current organizational structures and procedures. Customers were often asked in the process as well to see what they thought about potential new products or ideas. The problem with the methodology was that it felt too vague and unstructured. Ideas were either too radical to suggest and implement, or based on current knowledge that would only result in small, meaningless changes. Customers often lacked valuable information as they were asked to speculate on things the company had not yet done that did not fit with its standard operating procedures (SOP).
When analyzing the results of failures in the use of brainstorming, three main failures in the process were observed. Individuals gathered in groups tended to make less effort to come up with ideas than themselves, through an effect known as social bitching. Peer pressure within the group also stifled the level of radical solutions to problems that would come to mind but would not be proposed, known as evaluation apprehension. Production blocking was another significant limitation, where a small number of individuals would dominate the group and prevent the active participation of others.
The innovative thinking approach tries to get around all of these flaws by setting boundaries and encouraging innovative thinking based on those boundaries. First, it identifies known issues that are serious to the business but are rarely openly discussed due to company culture or hopelessness of changing the situation, as the top cause of customer complaints. It then depersonalizes the discussion, focusing entirely on known business quirks to garner new ideas, such as how the company’s products might be used by some customers in unexpected but beneficial ways. To prevent blocking production, group sizes are limited to four individuals, where the mix of people is chosen based on the likelihood that everyone will participate in the discussion.
Defining the parameters of innovative thinking are the first concrete steps to making any progress. They involve assuming that the problem is unique so that new solutions will be sought rather than old ones, and looking for the underlying cause of the problem. Thinking beyond the confines of the current problem, estimating what will happen when it is resolved, and how it will change the business in the future, is also seen as instrumental in coming to a sudden realization that will actually work. The whole process is also based on ensuring that accurate information exists beforehand and that everyone is involved in finding a solution. Also, it’s also important to set deadlines for implementation, or the innovative thinking has a way to get back to brainstorming with no game or specific end goal in sight.
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