Generating Ideas for Innovation

How do ideas get into your company? Well, relevant ideas should come from all areas of the company if possible. Listen to your customers. Observe how your customers’ customers interact with your products. Also involve suppliers in the idea generation process. Closed networks feed their development processes from a limited source (monovation), while open networks

Creativity for Innovations

All creativity techniques are about how the thinking space or the search field for possible solutions can be expanded and how latent knowledge can be tapped for finding solutions. The solution process should be as self-organized and self-responsible as possible. Unplanned and unexpected things are explicitly desired, because only new things really take you further.

Create the Conditions for Creativity

Good management cannot be achieved through “business administration” alone. A high degree of market-oriented creativity is needed on top, especially in dynamic, complex environments. It is not always easy to gather creative ideas, but there are proven creativity techniques. Some organizations are incapable of recognizing opportunities that really take them further, and incapable of consistently

Use creativity techniques purposefully

In order not to leave it to chance whether new ways are found, you can fall back on proven intuitive and discursive methods. With such methods, you systematically ensure that poorly structured problems for which there is not yet a solution are approached in an unbiased manner, that these problems are sufficiently abstracted, new mental

Intuitive methods for more creativity

What are intuitive creativity techniques? In addition to discursive methods, there are intuitive methods that promote creativity. Intuitive methods activate the subconscious and stimulate associations with completely different areas from which, if necessary, ways of solving concrete problems can be adopted. Intuitive methods create connections with knowledge that was previously unconnected and therefore not included

Brainstorming as a creativity technique

Probably the best-known intuitive method is brainstorming, a method developed as early as 1939 by Alex F. Osborn, which encourages people to approach a problem in a completely free and unbiased manner, to be inspired by each other in a group that is as heterogeneous as possible, and to boldly combine creative ideas with each

Brain writing as a creativity technique

Brainwriting, which was modified from , ensures that during idea collection (i) no ideas are lost and (ii) participants’ thoughts are not immediately influenced by what is said. However, it is this component of spontaneous further development of ideas that is lost.

Method 635 as a creativity technique

The disadvantages of brainwriting are compensated for with method 635, which was developed by Bernd Rohrbach. According to method 635, six participants further develop three ideas of the other participants in about five minutes to arrive at eighteen creative ideas.

KJ method as a creativity technique

A variation of Method 635 is the KJ method, developed in 1967 and named after its Japanese creator Jiro Kawakita, which works in a very similar way to , but has become more widely accepted than Method 635 in corporate practice, especially in the automotive industry.

Mind mapping as a creativity technique

Another common creativity technique is mind mapping, which was developed and documented by Tony Buzan in 1971. Unlike the free-form approach of , during the mind-mapping process ideas are laid out as chains of associations in a growing, networked structure. Mind-mapping continues thoughts on the basis of a structural tree, but also enables the inclusion

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