AHBETE

[miniMBA_02] Creativity & Design Thinking

What is Creativity and Why is it Important?

• • Creativity = both novel and useful
  • Creativity = change
  • Inventive Creativity - not just new products and services but also new ways to do your work

Creativity Process

Imagination - your thoughts, dreams, ideas, musings

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Creativity - getting an idea out of your head and into the world

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Innovation - turning your creative act into a market savvy idea

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Entrepreneurship - enlisting others and bringing the idea to fruition

Blockers to Creativity

• • Fear - of looking bad, failing, or getting it “wrong”
  • Voice of Judgement - internally judging our own thoughts
  • Habit - of not exercising our curiosity and creativity

4 Creativity Mindsets to Solve Problems

1. 1. Curiosity - allowing our child-like awe of the world
   2. Divergent Thinking - multiple ideas before choosing a solution
   3. Tolerance of Ambiguity - doing things that don’t have an instruction manual
   4. Risk, Failure, Resilience - allowing ourselves to take risks even if we might fail sometimes and need to adapt and try again

What does it mean to creatively solve a problem?

• • *Not* the first right idea
  • An unexpected solution
  • Has an advantage over competition
  • Makes sense while surprising us

How Creativity Works

• • Business is like a game with rules, but the game can change - like a moving target.
  • Big ideas cause big changes and require businesses to go through a revolution.
  • Creativity is your legal advantage over competitors.
  • Intentional creativity involves following a process to achieve reliable and consistent creativity.

The Creative Process & an Overview of Design Thinking

The Design Thinking Process

1. 1. Empathize - share the feelings of others to understand our consumers’ needs
   2. Define - understand the real problem you are solving by using tools such as ethnography; watching how people behave in their wild habitat or how they express themselves online.
   3. Ideate - brainstorm a lot of ideas and determine which ideas are the best possible solutions
   4. Prototype - some form of draft that allows us to test our ideas before committing to doing them
   5. Test - solicit honest feedback in order to drive improvements

Brainstorming

• • Go for quantity - don’t focus on your first idea
  • Build on the ideas of others
  • Seek wild and unusual ideas
  • Don’t judge your ideas until after the ideas are generated

Use a creative diamond approach to brainstorming and start with a challenge question that poses what might be possible.

Rules for Gathering Feedback

1. 1. Fall in love with the problem, not your solution.
   2. Solicit honest feedback from people.
   3. Use a feedback loop and use what is learned to rebuild and improve the solution until it is a “wow.”

Tools to Carry On

Defining questions to Consider

• Are we solving the right problem?

Reconsider ALL of the customer journey.

• What other challenge questions might help us look at all of the most critical problems?

What else should we be asking ourselves to dig deeper?

• Do we have a brilliant solution or just an idea that needs further development?

Do we benefit by revisiting the solution?

• Have we converged on the best parameters?

Keep the novelty of your solution alive.