Reflecting on "Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship"

Using the Learning Assessment Tool as a jumping off point, I wanted my final blog post to be a reflection on the different techniques, ideas, and books we examined and discussed during the last couple of months, many of which found their way in some form or another in earlier blog posts.

10 Creativity Techniques

In My Own Words and How I Used Them

1. The Job To Be Done. I think the aim of this creativity technique is to be able to clearly and efficiently explain the need that our rubber band group would be meeting from the perspective of the consumer. This technique was definitely important to my group because it was working through this one that allowed us to settle on our #BandTogether idea (more on that on Sunday!)

2. Brainstorming.This technique is sort of the "classic" understanding of brainstorming--getting a group of people together and scribbling out ideas on a large surface, allowing other people to be inspired and (literally) draw from each other's ideas to build up their own or others. I did this activity with a slightly different group of people than I did my rubber band project with, but I still thought that this was a good way for the class to "get our feet wet" when it comes to practicing creativity techniques.

3. Brainwriting. To me, this technique is a riff on brainstorming, in that the work is done silently and more personally; only a complete thought or idea is shared with the group, and then the members build upon it. I felt that my group was eager to discuss some of the ideas that were being passed back and forth, so it was hard to work through until the end of the exercise since we were itching to jump to the next step.

4. Random Stimulus. This was a technique I tried again by myself, and although the results weren't as successful the second time around, this is a good technique in that it gets your brain to think about the problem differently by introducing random and miscellaneous words and images into the process to startle yourself out of the path you had previously been working on. I think our group (and probably most of the groups) got a kick out of the random assortment of toys, celebrities, places, and foods that we were shown to get us thinking differently. I suspect that even that unexpected moment of laughter or joy also helped propel us in different directions and get to creative places we hadn't initially thought possible.

5. Creative Pause. This creativity technique is one that aims to let you step back for a moment or two to reset before diving back in to the brainstorming activity. This one was difficult for me personally since any break in work merits a Facebook or e-mail check, so simply stepping back, quieting my mind and reflecting for a couple of quiet minutes isn't something I'm used to.

6. Mindfulness Training. This technique is kind of like an expanded version of the technique above; it requires you to take a longer break to clear your mind before returning to the task at hand, but with your mind relaxed and hopefully even fresher. I think this is a wonderful technique in life (particularly during a harried or stressful work day) but due to the limited time of the class, I wasn't as enthusiastic about this technique within the context of the class, particularly given our condensed schedule. I am a huge fan of yoga in general, and would highly recommend the Sweat and Soul yoga studio for anyone who either loves yoga, or wants to try it out in a safe and friendly environment.

7. Thinking Hats. As an organizational and idea evaluation technique, the "Thinking Hats" definitely got our group off and running on our #BandTogether idea, because it forced us to focus on one component of the idea at a time, allowing us to efficiently and effectively work through the concept. Having a group member act as the guiding hand or "Blue Hat" also made this a particularly effective creativity technique for my rubber band group.

8. HIT Matrix. This creativity technique is another one that aims to shakeup the thinking or brainstorming process by forcing you to compare two (seemingly) completely different products/services/experiences in order to develop something new from one or more of the overlaps. This was a technique that my group practice offline and out of the classroom, which I think made it not quite as useful to us as some of the other techniques.

9. Provocation and Movement. This technique has you think the exact opposite way from what you had been doing previously; instead of trying to solve a problem, you think about ways you might exacerbate it. My group definitely utilized this one to it's extreme, which is how we probably came up with #BandTogether as a hashtag, and moved away from the actual rubber band as a physical object made out of a specific kind of material that we could work with and base our idea off of.

10. The Innovation Matrix. this technique is quite similar to the HIT Matrix, but instead of comparing products/services/experience with other products/services/experiences, compare them with markets. This serves to shift the focus of your idea from the creativity and innovation stage to the innovation and entrepreneurship stage.

Reflecting on the Experience of Pitch Training

"The Pitch" was something that intrigued me so much I wrote an earlier blog post analyzing how effective they were on the reality competition series Shark Tank. For me, working on the pitch in the smaller groups was what made it worthwhile to practice. I got to know the people in my pitch group better than other members of the class (excluding my rubber band group) and therefore felt much safer and more comfortable practicing my pitch in front of them. Similarly, I was able to really take to heart the feedback I received from them. I think this was for two reasons: 

1) Like I said above, that I felt so comfortable with them that I was able to understand that the feedback wasn't personal, but rather, was talking specifically about how I had delivered my pitch

2) The format of the feedback ("I really liked the way that you X, but wish that you had Y...") also removed the person and just focused solely on the pitch, which also helped me accept and see the feedback as helpful

The other wonderful thing about the pitch training was not just hearing all the cool and different ideas, but seeing what people were passionate about. I felt that the pitches not only revealed windows into people's hobbies and interests, but also tackled real-world problems and sometimes even aimed to start nonprofits and other service organizations that sought to help others, rather than just turn a profit (even if they were fictional.) I know I will try to incorporate much of what I learned about crafting and delivering the pitch as I begin to interview for and apply to different doctoral programs, and hopefully be able to pitch "myself" into an acceptance letter or two!

My Major Takeaways of the 3 Books

For The Creative Habit, I definitely took away the idea of the box, and being free to stick any bit of ephemera or inspirational object, along with files, checklists, post-its, and research materials as a way to both record and save every component that went into a creative project. I'm normally super organized and am all about tabs, files, color-coding, and organization when it comes to dealing with projects (normally because they're usually in very structured formats, such as papers or as other concrete deliverables), but the idea that I can just throw everything in a box and that not only will it be safe, but that I will be okay was something incredibly important that I took away from this book, and has stuck with me since May.

For The Art of Innovation, the idea that the physical spaces we create and the physical objects that we surround ourselves with are just important to our creativity and our work output was an important takeaway for me. Ever since I began working in the "9-5 world" after graduating from college I have been very intrigued by the different kinds of work spaces certain professional environments offer. I've worked in a giant room with no dividers; I've worked in a ceiling-less office. I wrote the vast majority of my GCS capstone at a Starbucks in Brookline, but banged out a 10 page paper (that I'm incredibly proud of) for my Feminist Media Studies course from the same position on my couch. I've read articles about novel desks in classrooms that allow students who tend to fidget to stand up and even move around while they do their work, instead of being confined to a chair. I think all of this relates to the kinds of spaces Kelley was talking about in his book, and I think that is why that part stuck out to me the most.

Finally, with The $100 Startup, I really liked the way he encouraged the readers to just "jump right in" when it comes to starting their projects. I can get really panicked and even stall sending out important (and even not-so-important) e-mails because the wording isn't perfect, or I can't get my signature to look just so. Obviously there are times when you need to have all of your ducks in a row (I wouldn't suggest a plane to taxi down the runway without enough fuel) but in the instance of a microbusiness or startup (or even job application) sometimes the key is to just jump right it and figure out some of the details later. 

Watching "Silicon Valley" for Creativity Techniques

After I had watched some pitching in action with my Shark Tank experiment, I starting think about the other components of our class--namely, the 10 Creativity Techniques--and whether or not I might find any of those represented in popular culture. It wasn't long before I realized that a brand new show had aired this spring that was all about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and was one that I had briefly wrote about in a previous blog post: namely, HBO's comedy series Silicon Valley. 

I didn't know much about the show, other than that it was a comedy, it was set in the world of tech startups, and it starred a bunch of quite funny comedians. For those unfamiliar, here is the trailer:

My plan was to watch the first 2 episodes (30 minutes each) and take note of which of the 10 creativity techniques the characters implemented and write about them for a blog post. The first part went off without a hitch...but when it came to write about the creativity techniques I was stumped, simply because in a show set in Silicon Valley about a number of companies (both startups and Google-esque tech giants), there was absolutely zero brainstorming shown onscreen in the first two episodes.

I had initially thought that a show like Silicon Valley, which takes place entirely in the so-called "innovation industry," would be chock-full of fictionalized brainstorming, or scenes in which the characters engage in activities that would at least be tangentially related to any number of the creativity techniques we experimented with in class. That said, I'm still happy that I watched the show and thought it was useful to watch and think about in the context of studying and thinking about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship for this class.

One area of research that I have pursued during my time in the Simmons GCS program, and one that I hope to continue to work in as a doctoral student, is television and popular culture. I think that it is important to examine how our culture reacts to, records, and reinterprets social movements and cultural epochs, with television shows being a prime example of a living text that does just that. Silicon Valley is a show that appears to be reflecting, satirizing, and even challenging this current moment in which innovation is seen as something that happens when socially hapless "nerds" singularly devote their time and energy to developing websites and apps in order to cash in and attempt to claim the title of the world's youngest billionaire.

As we read about in The Art of Innovation, not only is this decidedly not how innovation happens, that is also not even why people are creative and/or innovative. Although I have only watched 2 episodes, Silicon Valley also seems to be suggesting that innovation, creativity, and even entrepreneurship is not just about the bottom line and using buzzwords. The one character that seems to embody these stereotypes has been set up as the series antagonist: Gavin Belson (played by Matt Ross) is the CEO of Hooli, and in the pilot offers series protagonist Richard (Thomas Middlemarch) $10 million for his startup, Pied Piper. Richard ultimately rejects the offer in favor of building up Pied Piper himself with the help of Silicon Valley guru and investor Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch), demonstrating that although the show doesn't quite show (at least not in its first hour) the process of brainstorming as we've come to understand it in class, it at least exhibits the same ethos about how and why we innovate.

Innovation vs. Creativity

Prior to taking this class, I always conceptualized creativity, or the act of creating, as starting completely from scratch with a brand new idea, developing it, and then introducing this entirely new product or service into the world. Innovation, on the other hand, was about continuously building upon already-existing ideas, either by improving them, or applying their uses and abilities in new and different ways. Although I'm beginning to re-imagine both of these definitions through the work we're doing in this class, I was curious about how other people understood innovation, creativity, and the distinction between the two.

I did a little bit of research into who has written about innovation and creativity recently and came across The New York Times Magazine's "The Innovations Issue" from June of 2013. As the introduction to the issue explains, "This special issue of the magazine is devoted to innovation and its assorted mysteries." I was curious to see how the magazine understood, conceptualized, and then wrote about "Innovation," so I read the entire cover story, which answered the question, "What made that?" of 48 innovations the magazine deemed important. For this blog post, I reacted to all 46 innovations, deciding whether I thought they were ultimately examples of innovation or creativity based on nothing but my own gut instinct. A few on the list really spoke to me for personal reasons, and others stood out because of how much thought I put into how to categorize them. Those are in bold in the list below.

1. Air bag - creation because I felt that it was a totally new aspect of a relatively new human invention.

2. Ant Farm - innovation, but not totally sure why it matters or is on this list.

3. A.T.M. - innovation, since it does what bank tellers had always been doing, and because it is one that is continuously innovating, as I've seen the firsthand the incremental improvements from going to the bank as a child with my parents, and now as an adult doing my own banking

4. Band-aid - innovation since it does something that had always been done, just in a more efficient way. That said, maybe the name in and of itself is a creation since I think most Americans refer to all self-adhesive bandages as band-aids, regardless of whether they are the brand or not.
5. Bike share - innovation as I conceptualize it in the United States, especially Boston's version of Hubway, although reading about its European origins as the magazine reported it also makes it seem like it's a creation.

6. Bottle service - innovation, since it was an adaptation of a practice from Paris, and also similar to restaurant-like service in a club setting.

7. Brannock Device (foot measurer from shoe stores) - innovation because it is doing something that people had done prior (measuring the size of feet for shoes). Then again, something about that device is very iconic for me, very reminiscent of my childhood, and which makes we want to say this is an example of creativity, even though I can easily argue against myself.

8. Breath mint - innovation, something people have been doing throughout human history, just the kinds of packaging and flavors are relatively new (from the beginning of the 20th century.)

9. Brunch - innovation (fusing meals we already have) but also a kind of creation, since it's not just the food or time of day, but the entire ethos and reasoning behind going to brunch (celebrating a kind of weekend laziness, friendships, enjoying leisure time and the day, etc.)

10. Bullet - creation at first, (especially since the magazine showed a picture of a lead musket ball from 18th century) but then clearly demonstrated how it had been innovated for the last 200+ years with pictures and explanations.

11. Bunsen Burner - innovation since a device made for producing a flame had been created before.

12. Cat Videos - innovation, and a very strange one at that this is quite emblematic to this period of stagnant innovation which the issue's introduction talked about.

13. Cleats - creation, despite the prior existence of shoes. Also something that has been steadily innovated every since they were first devised by Henry VIII.

14. Condom - creation, then innovated continuously ever since an Italian doctor in the mid-1500s first came up with the idea of a "linen cloth" made to block syphilis.

15. Cuisinart - a classic example of innovation in my mind, taking something that people already did to prepare meals and with food ingredients and creating a specific tool to do it with.

16. Currency - creation with long standing history, and one that it seems like hasn't really seen any innovation until very recently (i.e. Bitcoin).

17. Diet Soda - innovation

18. Digital Camera - innovation, aided by technological advancements.

19. Dog Park - innovation, in tandem with innovations in pet owning and pet culture.

20. Fast Fashion - to be honest, even after reading the description, I'm still not entirely sure what that is, but I still think it's an innovation in clothing and wardrobe based on the name alone.
21. Gay Marriage - innovation, but perhaps innovating the wrong way (trying to make everyone fit into this very specific box, when maybe we should change the shape of the box, or even get rid of it entirely?)
22. Glass Ceiling - This one was tricky for me. At first, it seemed like neither an innovation nor an act of creativity, but then I thought about it in terms of semiotics--giving a specific name to something that previously exists, which in turn makes that very specific thing something that people understand and can talk about. By that rationale, then, I guess it is an act of creativity.
23. Guitar Solo - innovation, music and guitars exist after all.
24. Insider Trading - the act of doing it is a creation (and an old one at that), but the laws attempting to prevent it by criminalizing it are--I would argue--an innovation, by being an extension of something that already exists.
25. Keys - creation and then innovation, as the article wonderfully demonstrated with a beautiful illustrated history of the lock & key from the warded lock to the combination lock to the Yale lock to the key card to the fob.

26. Lacrosse Head - Innovation (talking about the modern version, which drew on Native American inspiration).

27. Liquid Paper - innovation, because this was an example from the Art of Innovation, and because doing something that people were doing anyway, just painstakingly (by starting over and re-typing.)
28. Low-Carb Diet - innovation that goes hand in hand with a lot of other contemporary human innovation, such as standards of healthy, beauty, and the businesses of such things that are constantly evolving.

29. Nose Job - tricky because it seems like innovation of already-existing surgery, but also seemed to create this cottage industry of plastic surgery, but ultimately (and for the same reasons as Low Carb Diet above) I would say this is an innovation.

30. Parenting - innovation in that there were starting to be widespread tactics and strategies to raising children into particular kinds of adults. This idea also evolved alongside public healthy and safety measures, such as mortality rates taking a nose dive, which led to the idea that children could be adored and loved since now the odds were they would live through childhood.

31. PB&J - innovation, and probably my favorite one on this list so far since it's hard for me to think of any food as a creation (humans need sustenance). Then again, it also probably is a creation because of the way it evokes childhood and nostalgia and a particular kind of longing. The picture that accompanies this listing in the issue is of 3 stacked sandwiches overflowing with gooey peanut butter and sticky jelly, and it literally made my mouth water. And while I would argue that my palate has evolved quite a bit since I had my first PB&J in the late '80s...the fact that it looked SO delicious to me makes me put it in the creation category.
32. Pop-Up Store - innovation, thinking of history of merchants and wares.
33. "Previously On..." - innovation, reminiscent of serialized magazine stories from the 18th and 19th centuries that became novels.

34. Prom - innovation from balls, dances, and other kinds of social gatherings.

35. Rachel Maddow - innovation from television journalists (although she happens to be a personal favorite of mine!)
36. Retirement Age - innovation again from the ability of humans to live much longer, of the way wealth has accumulated, and the way we culturally understand adulthood.
37. Rock-Climbing Wall - to me, clear innovation from something that exists in nature and outside. Also one that allows for limitations of human physiology, a nice thing for newbies and those with a fear of heights (in this instance I am both)
38. Salad Spinner - innovation, another example of food technology making it easier and more efficient to do something we've always done as part of food preparation.

39. Sleep-away Camp - ok I know I went on and on about PB&J, but sleep-away camp is another one that evokes so much feeling for me that I have to say it's a creation. I attended for 11 years, and if I had a time machine the first thing I would do is go re-live those summers.

40. Tampon - innovation, and an interesting tidbit about them that I learned from this article was that they were useful for women on regimented schedules, i.e. on factory lines who wouldn't be able to excuse themselves for purposes of regularly changing sanitary napkins.

41. Turnstile - innovation, particularly from the use on farms to their use in public transit. Great jump that to me is the essence of innovation.

42. 12-Step Program - I think this one is actually a creation, but goes hand in hand with development of addiction as a disease that can be managed.

43.Wave - as in "the wave" at sports games, which to me is an innovation and a weird one at that. Really, what does this accomplish? (And for that matter, why do creations/innovations need to accomplish something anyway?)
44. Web page - I believe this is technically an innovation, but to me it feels like a creation, and this is the exact kind of thing that makes the distinction between the two very important and yet also somehow totally irrelevant. I'm sure the concept of the web page wasn't developed from nothing, but has had many antecedents for many more years than I even realize, but the way the world understands the web and web technology and how that has changed so drastically in the last 15-20 years makes me want to put one of the items that contributed to that kind of cultural and social rupture into the "creativity" category.
45. White Lab Coat - innovation, and one that goes hand in hand with notions about cleanliness and sterility.
46. Zip Line - innovation, particularly in its use as a tourist attraction.

Whew, that was a lot of thinking and deciding and categorizing! I think I've realized that even if a particularly item isn't necessarily an act of creativity, if it drastically changes the culture, then for me, I consider it a creation rather than an innovation.