Techniques of Organization Development
- Survey Feedback
- Team Building
- Sensitivity Training
- Managerial Grid
- Management by Objectives
- Brain Storming
- Process Consultation
- Quality Circles
- Transactional Analysis
Developing an Invention
The general process of inventing involves systematic and practical steps that might include linear and nonlinear thinking. You might think that only people with innate artistic skills are creative and that only geniuses become innovators and inventors, but much of creativity is driven by being immersed in a practice. You can build and foster your own creativity. Your idea of an inventor might be someone like Johannes Gutenberg, who developed the printing press. The spread of printing ultimately redrew the map of Europe and resulted in the foundation of new centers of learning. Gutenbergās supposed spark actually was more of a slow burn. He was creative and innovativeāone of historyās most famous inventorsābut his printing press, like all other inventions, was a synthesis of existing technologies. Gutenbergās most important innovation was his use of moveable, interchangeable metal type instead of entire hand-carved wooden blocks of text (Figure 4.14). Perfecting his printing process took decades and left him all but broke.44 The notion of the inventorās single stroke of genius is mostly myth. The people that history remembers usually worked very hard to develop their creativity, to become familiar with the processes and tools that were ripe for innovation in their time, and ultimately to make something so unique that society recognizes it as an invention.
One model for developing an invention is the first five steps of a plan adapted from Sourcify.com, which specializes in connecting product developers with manufacturers.45 This process is succinct and includes suggestions for building a team along the wayĀ
Step 1: Educate Yourself
Before your inventive product can do battle with other inventions, you will need to educate yourself. To prepare yourself to weather the competition, you need to learn as much as you can about the current investing climate, current product development opportunities, and current leadership approaches. Even if you are not deeply interested in leadership dogma, it helps to know what the current trends are in leadership and product development. To succeed as an inventor in a vast marketplace, you need to understand the rules, written and unwritten, of the industry and competitive landscape. The product development process can be quite involved. The process can vary by industry and by availability of resources.
Step 2: Stay Organized
Most tip sheets for inventors suggest that you find a method for organizing your creativity so that you donāt spend time trying to remember previous ideas, plans, and decisions. You must organize information related to your business idea, your business plan, and your potential teammates in the process.
Step 3: Conduct Market Research
Market research is an obvious must, but many entrepreneurs fail to go as deeply as they should in researching their competition. You must be aware of current and future competitors so that you are prepared to compete in the marketplace when you are actually ready. Being the best on paper now wonāt be much use when you enter the marketplace with an MVP in six to eight months in competition with competitorsā new products and updates.
Step 4: Conduct Patent Research
If you expect to apply for a patent, take the time to read up on policies and procedures. Officials in the US Patent Office, or in similar bureaus in other countries, decide whether an invention is worthy of receiving a patent. A patentable invention must meet the criteria of being novel, useful, and nonobvious; it must be proven to be workable.47 Those three standardsānovel, useful, and nonobviousāare subjective. So is the concept of invention, but conceptualizing invention this way sets a high bar for entrepreneurs who truly wish to make a social impact. Developing an invention that is patentable also creates a barrier against competition, which can make the difference between business success and failure.
Step 5: Develop a Prototype
Developing a prototype can be the most fun or the most tedious part of inventing. Much of your attitude toward developing a prototype depends on available resources, technology, and expertise. In this text, we reference the concept of the lean startup from time to time. In the lean startup model, the prototype is most often an MVP. As we saw earlier, an MVP is a version of your invention that may not be polished or complete in terms of how you envisioned it, but it functions well enough and looks good enough that you can begin to market it with reasonable hopes that it will be adopted. For other inventions, you may need to build a more advanced prototype. This requires serious investment capital, but the payoff is that users will interact with a version of the product that looks and functions more like what you had in mind during your ideation phase. As an inventor, you are responsible for establishing quality control minimums for your product. You may have to compromise on your vision, but you should not compromise on basic functionality or basic levels of quality in materials.
The Creative Process: The Five Stages of Creativity
Raw creativity and an affinity for lateral thinking may be innate, but creative people must refine these skills in order to become masters in their respective fields. They practice in order to apply their skills readily and consistently, and to integrate them with other thought processes and emotions. Anyone can improve in creative efforts with practice. For our purposes, practice is a model for applied creativity that is derived from an entrepreneurial approach
- Preparation
- Incubation
- Insight
- Evaluation
- Elaboration
Preparation
Preparation involves investigating a chosen field of interest, opening your mind, and becoming immersed in materials, mindset, and meaning. If you have ever tried to produce something creative without first absorbing relevant information and observing skilled practitioners at work, then you understand how difficult it is. This base of knowledge and experience mixed with an ability to integrate new thoughts and practices can help you sift through the ideas quicker. However, relying too heavily on prior knowledge can restrict the creative process. When you immerse yourself in a creative practice, you make use of the products or the materials of othersā creativity. For example, a video-game designer plays different types of video games on different consoles, computers, and online in networks. They may play alone, with friends in collaboration, or in competition. Consuming the products in a field gives you a sense of what is possible and indicates boundaries that you may attempt to push with your own creative work. Preparation broadens your mind and lets you study the products, practice, and culture in a field. It is also a time for goal setting. Whether your chosen field is directly related to art and design, such as publishing, or involves human-centric design, which includes all sorts of software and product design efforts, you need a period of open-minded reception to ideas. Repetitive practice is also part of the preparation stage, so that you can understand the current field of production and become aware of best practices, whether or not you are currently capable of matching them. During the preparation stage, you can begin to see how other creative people put meaning into their products, and you can establish benchmarks against which to measure your own creative work.
Preparation involves investigating a chosen field of interest, opening your mind, and becoming immersed in materials, mindset, and meaning. If you have ever tried to produce something creative without first absorbing relevant information and observing skilled practitioners at work, then you understand how difficult it is. This base of knowledge and experience mixed with an ability to integrate new thoughts and practices can help you sift through the ideas quicker. However, relying too heavily on prior knowledge can restrict the creative process. When you immerse yourself in a creative practice, you make use of the products or the materials of othersā creativity. For example, a video-game designer plays different types of video games on different consoles, computers, and online in networks. They may play alone, with friends in collaboration, or in competition. Consuming the products in a field gives you a sense of what is possible and indicates boundaries that you may attempt to push with your own creative work. Preparation broadens your mind and lets you study the products, practice, and culture in a field. It is also a time for goal setting. Whether your chosen field is directly related to art and design, such as publishing, or involves human-centric design, which includes all sorts of software and product design efforts, you need a period of open-minded reception to ideas. Repetitive practice is also part of the preparation stage, so that you can understand the current field of production and become aware of best practices, whether or not you are currently capable of matching them. During the preparation stage, you can begin to see how other creative people put meaning into their products, and you can establish benchmarks against which to measure your own creative work.
Incubation
Incubation refers to giving yourself, and your subconscious mind in particular, time to incorporate what you learned and practiced in the preparation stage. Incubation involves the absence of practice. It may look to an outsider as though you are at rest, but your mind is at work. A change of environment is key to incubating ideas.36 A new environment allows you to receive stimuli other than those directly associated with the creative problem you are working on. It could be as simple as taking a walk or going to a new coffee shop to allow your mind to wander and take in the information you gathered in the previous stage. Mozart stated, āWhen I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheerāsay, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.ā37 Incubation allows your mind to integrate your creative problem with your stored memories and with other thoughts or emotions you might have. This simply is not possible to do when you are consciously fixated on the creative problem and related tasks and practice.
Incubation refers to giving yourself, and your subconscious mind in particular, time to incorporate what you learned and practiced in the preparation stage. Incubation involves the absence of practice. It may look to an outsider as though you are at rest, but your mind is at work. A change of environment is key to incubating ideas.36 A new environment allows you to receive stimuli other than those directly associated with the creative problem you are working on. It could be as simple as taking a walk or going to a new coffee shop to allow your mind to wander and take in the information you gathered in the previous stage. Mozart stated, āWhen I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheerāsay, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.ā37 Incubation allows your mind to integrate your creative problem with your stored memories and with other thoughts or emotions you might have. This simply is not possible to do when you are consciously fixated on the creative problem and related tasks and practice.
Insight
Insight or āilluminationā is a term for the āaha!ā momentāwhen the solution to a creative problem suddenly becomes readily accessible to your conscious mind. The āaha!ā moment has been observed in literature, in history, and in cognitive studies of creativity.39 Insights may come all at once or in increments. They are not easily understood because, by their very nature, they are difficult to isolate in research and experimental settings. For the creative entrepreneur, however, insights are a delight. An insight is the fleeting time when your preparation, practice, and period of incubation coalesce into a stroke of genius. Whether the illumination is the solution to a seemingly impossible problem or the creation of a particularly clever melody or turn of phrase, creative people often consider it a highlight in their lives. For an entrepreneur, an insight holds the promise of success and the potential to help massive numbers of people overcome a pain point or problem. Not every insight will have a global impact, but coming up with a solution that your subconscious mind has been working on for some time is a real joy.
Insight or āilluminationā is a term for the āaha!ā momentāwhen the solution to a creative problem suddenly becomes readily accessible to your conscious mind. The āaha!ā moment has been observed in literature, in history, and in cognitive studies of creativity.39 Insights may come all at once or in increments. They are not easily understood because, by their very nature, they are difficult to isolate in research and experimental settings. For the creative entrepreneur, however, insights are a delight. An insight is the fleeting time when your preparation, practice, and period of incubation coalesce into a stroke of genius. Whether the illumination is the solution to a seemingly impossible problem or the creation of a particularly clever melody or turn of phrase, creative people often consider it a highlight in their lives. For an entrepreneur, an insight holds the promise of success and the potential to help massive numbers of people overcome a pain point or problem. Not every insight will have a global impact, but coming up with a solution that your subconscious mind has been working on for some time is a real joy.
Evaluation
Evaluation is the purposeful examination of ideas. You will want to compare your insights with the products and ideas you encountered during preparation. You also will want to compare your ideas and product prototypes to the goals you set out for yourself during the preparation phase. Creative professionals will often invite others to critique their work at this stage. Because evaluation is specific to the expectations, best practices, and existing product leaders in each field, evaluation can take on many forms. You are looking for assurance that your standards for evaluation are appropriate. Judge yourself fairly, even as you apply strict criteria and the well-developed sense of taste you acquired during the preparation phase. For example, you might choose to interview a few customers in your target demographics for your product or service. The primary objective is to understand the customer perspective and the extent to which your idea aligns with their position.
Evaluation is the purposeful examination of ideas. You will want to compare your insights with the products and ideas you encountered during preparation. You also will want to compare your ideas and product prototypes to the goals you set out for yourself during the preparation phase. Creative professionals will often invite others to critique their work at this stage. Because evaluation is specific to the expectations, best practices, and existing product leaders in each field, evaluation can take on many forms. You are looking for assurance that your standards for evaluation are appropriate. Judge yourself fairly, even as you apply strict criteria and the well-developed sense of taste you acquired during the preparation phase. For example, you might choose to interview a few customers in your target demographics for your product or service. The primary objective is to understand the customer perspective and the extent to which your idea aligns with their position.
Elaboration
The last stage in the creative process is elaboration, that is, actual production. Elaboration can involve the release of a minimum viable product (MVP). This version of your invention may not be polished or complete, but it should function well enough that you can begin to market it while still elaborating on it in an iterative development process. Elaboration also can involve the development and launch of a prototype, the release of a software beta, or the production of some piece of artistic work for sale. Many consumer-product companies, such as Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble, will establish a small test market to garner feedback and evaluations of new products from actual customers. These insights can give the company valuable information that can help make the product or service as successful as possible.
The last stage in the creative process is elaboration, that is, actual production. Elaboration can involve the release of a minimum viable product (MVP). This version of your invention may not be polished or complete, but it should function well enough that you can begin to market it while still elaborating on it in an iterative development process. Elaboration also can involve the development and launch of a prototype, the release of a software beta, or the production of some piece of artistic work for sale. Many consumer-product companies, such as Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble, will establish a small test market to garner feedback and evaluations of new products from actual customers. These insights can give the company valuable information that can help make the product or service as successful as possible.
Develop the Solution
The solution describes a way of solving a particular problem within a system and all the elements of change necessary to improve the system.
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- Activities
- Tools
Introduction
The need to Develop the Solution is the third of the seven strands in the improvement model. It underlines the importance of developing the solution for the system to be improved, following understanding the system and defining the problem, and as a precursor to collecting the evidence. As a result, it is expected that such a solution will be developed in the intermediate stages of the improvement process and revised, as appropriate, as the process develops.
- Purpose
- Activities
- Tools
Getting Started
Developing the solution is essential for the successful delivery of an improvement project. It is particularly important to develop the solution in the middle of the improvement process and to update the description as necessary during the remainder of the process. The Understand, Design, Deliver and Sustain stages of an improvement process were previously described within the Introduction section, where each stage will likely comprise a preliminary activity, followed by a number of stage activities. For the Develop the Solution strand of the Understand phase, the preliminary activity is entitled Describe the Big Idea. For the Design, Delivery and Sustain stages, the concepts/solutions should be reviewed and updated as necessary to support the ongoing improvement process.
Activities
Consider Pre-existing Solutions The identification, review and presentation of existing solutions with the potential to satisfy the demands of the requirements Purpose: to consider pre-existing solutions that have the potential to meet the system requirements Inputs: Define Requirements, Stimulate Ideas Tools: Morphological Chart Outputs: a list of pre-existing solutions with potential to satisfy the demands of the requirements
Top tips:
- Allow plenty of time for solution identification and review
- Ensure pre-existing solutions meet the demands in the requirements
- Avoid fixation to encourage a broader search
Tools
The early evaluation of new concepts to see if they satisfy the demands and meet the wishes of the requirements Purpose: to make models of new concepts to enable early evaluation against the system requirements Inputs: Consider Pre-existing Solutions, Filter Ideas, Develop Concepts Tools: tbd Outputs: a number of models and evidence of their behaviour against the demands and wishes of the requirements Top tips: Produce a physical or virtual demonstration of the concept Consider different models for different purposes Consider quick tests with rough models to resolve critical issues The Understand, Design, Deliver and Sustain stages of an improvement process were previously described within the Introduction section, where each stage will likely comprise a preliminary activity, followed by a number of stage activities. For the Develop the Solution strand of the Understand phase, the preliminary activity is entitled Describe the Big Idea. For the Design, Delivery and Sustain stages, the concepts/solutions should be reviewed and updated as necessary to support the ongoing improvement process.