Innovator's Playbook

4AIdeate: Incubate & create

In stage three, you and your team shared your customer immersion experiences, distilled what is important to your customers, and crafted opportunity statements that can be leveraged as springboards for idea generation. In stage 4a, you’ll incubate and work on boosting your team’s creative confidence ready for generating fresh new ideas.

From my experience if you’ve got great customer insights then you can’t help but come up with exciting new ideas for solving your customers’ problems. However, you can increase the quantity and quality of your ideas further by increasing your creativity and applying it to idea generation.

Edward de Bono has done much to demystify creativity and inspire many of us to rediscover our own creativity. De Bono emphatically states that without creativity there are no ideas, and without ideas organisations and the people within them will stagnate and neither will reach any sort of fulfilment. This is really important to me. We spend so much of our lives at work, so we want work to be as fulfilling as possible. Creativity plays a key role in providing this meaning and fulfilment. And it goes without saying that we need creativity to design and innovate.

We also know from the author of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that human beings are at their happiest (in flow, or ‘the zone’) when they are creating. People actually long to express their creativity and in this chapter I’ll share with you how to unleash it.

Incubation ...