The mind is the greatest resource needed for innovation

With mental capability, there are few limitations. Overload a machine and it can break down. Even computer chips have their speed limits. Resources can run dry. However, if we can help people make better use of their minds, the returns are immeasurable. The mind computer has the capacity to store an equivalent of 7550 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Organizational Freedom

The process of managing innovation ties in closely with organizational freedom. Managing innovation is not an oxymoron. Highly innovative companies manage the actual process of generating, developing and implementing innovative ideas better than their competitors do. This process involves a lot deliberate duplication and redundancy in order to foster knowledge sharing and communication. There are million garage start-ups in IT. In rural India, cowshed innovation is common. But in every case, it has blossomed in an atmosphere of organizational freedom.

THE CULTURE OF INNOVATION

Why wait for the whole country to be cleaned up? Why don’t we keep our own doorstep clean? Why wait for worldwide changes? Let us make a contribution to change our own small corporate space. Innovation is about lighting our little candles to defy the darkness. The organizational climate often decides whether the ideas flourish and bloom or fade and die. Thus, organizational culture becomes critical to innovation. Ricardo Semler of Semco, the South American magnate, believes that the culture of innovation in an organization is created by providing total freedom to his employees.

Analysis is a corollary to incubation

In the creative thinking process, incubation is followed by ‘Analysis.’ During the process of analysis, apply left-brain thinking – logical, statistical and mathematical. Solutions have to be carefully discussed and the optimum one chosen. The solutions are analyzed against the parameters chosen by the problem owner. Some prevalent parameters are: a) Time b) Budget c) Convenience d) Human resources e) Goodwill and impact on staff motivation levels f) Aesthetics g) Saving lives h) Political capital

The best ideas are stimulated during incubation

After idea generation, the next step in the thinking process is incubation. After you have spent time collecting the facts and generating ideas, forget the problem. Hand it over to the subconscious to incubate. The subconscious is a vast computer, which stores everything you have ever seen, felt, smelt or experienced. Alex Osborne, the advertising genius, said that during incubation, “I lie like a wet leaf on a log of wood and allow the current to carry me where it will.” Osborne continues, "When I am thus involved in doing nothing, I receive a constant stream of telegrams from my subconscious." He feels that he has done his best work when he was really doing nothing. Also bear in mind that luck favors the prepared mind. The thought process involved is a cycle, linking preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.

Direct Analogy

A direct analogy answers the question: Where else has this problem or a similar problem been solved? Maybe our problem can be solved in the same way. The richest source of analogous solutions seems to be the natural world. “Nature seems to have solved just about every problem we can think of, if only we know where to look and are able to translate the idea from one context to another,” writes Ronald Whitfield, in ‘Creativity in Industry.’ The same view is echoed by Gordon Edge, of PA Technology: “If you want to solve a problem, see how it is solved in nature. Living forms always have the most economical answers, as a result of evolution.” His team used the way a nocturnal moth’s eye absorbs light and thereby reflecting it, (by means of a delicate crisscross pattern coating the eye), as the basis for an information storage system on an optical disk. In the case of the optical disk for information storage, the connection to the nocturnal moth was found by ‘a lucky chain of coincidences,’ which recalls Pasteur’s comment that ‘chance favors the prepared mind,’ and George Prince’s modification of it – ‘the prepared mind makes its own chances.’ We cannot all be experts in biology, zoology and so on, but we can take an interest in a wide variety of phenomena and trust our own minds to throw up clues that will lead us to the analogies we need.

Career Excursion

One of the simplest of all excursions is to look at the problem through the eyes of someone completely different. You can do this by imagining you are in a totally different job – a coal miner, astronaut, deep-sea diver, football manager, and ballet dancer. As you imagine yourself in that job, see what ideas occur to you that might help with the problem.