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From Creativity to Innovation: the Importance of Design

This chapter highlights the importance of creativity to innovation, and outlines the role of design as the discipline and the activity by which to deliver innovations from the results of creative thinking. It summarizes advances in design thinking principles and processes, and draws on the author's own experiences with creative design processes to make some simple recommendations about the use of creativity techniques and design artifacts to enable more effective design innovation.

2.1. Creativity and innovation

The recent years have seen a growing interest in the adoption of creative and innovation processes in enterprises. Creativity and innovation are perceived to be increasingly important means by which enterprises can distinguish themselves in marketplaces. The strategic importance of creativity has been acknowledged by many commentators, both at the international level - the Nomura Research Institute's proposition is that creativity is the next economic activity, replacing the current focus on information - and within the UK, where the Cox review commissioned by Gordon Brown in 2005 saw exploitation of the nation's creative skills as "vital to the UK's long-term economic success" [COX 05]. The Cox review concluded that: "The success of the creative industries notwithstanding, there is evidence that UK business is not realizing the full potential of applying creativity more widely". Other European nations have similarly identified the importance of creativity and innovation to their macroeconomic growth.

Having said that, although many organizations are seeking to adopt processes to support and adapt creativity and innovation processes, the differences and relationships between these phenomena are, on the whole, poorly understood. This chapter argues that, if we are to develop new processes, methods and tools to improve creativity in industrial innovation, these organizations need to better understand the relationship between creativity and innovation. Therefore, the chapter explores the role of design to deliver the results of creative thinking through to innovation in enterprise settings more effectively, and introduces a set of creativity techniques and design artifacts that can be embedded into service design work in order to support creative thinking more effectively.

2.2. Creative problem-solving methods

Creativity has been the subject of research in different disciplines for much longer than research in business and enterprise. The Greek philosophers considered the nature of creativity in human endeavor. In the late 19th Century, mathematician Henri Poincaré reflected on the nature of successful creative thinking in science [HAD 54]. Creativity research in its current form was developed during World War II in the U.S. military, and grew in the 1950s when Osborn and Parnes [OBS 53] and Synectics [GOR 60] developed new creative-solving processes. During the 1960s and 1970s, leaders such as Edward De Bono developed lateral thinking [DEB 07] and Genrich Altshuller evolved the theory of the resolution of invention-related tasks (TRIZ) method [ALT 99] for structured creative problem solving (CPS). More recent creativity research has been undertaken in disciplines including cognitive psychology [CSI 96], artificial intelligence [RIT 01] and product design [MOG 07]. The result, today, is a large and multidisciplinary body of knowledge of theories and models, and large collections of processes, techniques and tools for CPS. Many researchers would agree with the following prototypical definition of creativity:

the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive to task constraints) [STE 99].

Most of the use of creative processes and techniques to deliver new and useful outcomes in business and enterprise today is based on the CPS methods that were developed from the 1950s onward. The first of these was the CPS method of Osborn and Parnes [OBS 53]. This method was originally intended to help people understand and use their creative talent more effectively. It supports six stages of problem solving: objective finding, fact finding, problem finding, idea finding, solution finding and acceptance finding. The six stages are arranged into three groups - understanding the problem, idea generation and planning for action. Multiple versions of the method have been developed over the last half-century, and it has been successfully applied to resolve many problems creatively in business, enterprise and other domains.

Central to this CPS method is an open exploration or search for ideas to generate many novel and varied ideas and new perspectives, and then focus thinking by identifying ideas with interesting or exciting potential to refine, develop and put to use. The method primarily uses traditional forms of brainstorming and related creativity techniques in this divergent phase of CPS. The application of the CPS method to support creative thinking about, for example, the redesign of an urban bicycle hire scheme, leads to the generation of a large number of ideas and concepts, normally documented on post-it notes, which are sorted and prioritized. Although useful, a method to support the development of a large and complex service such as cycle hire needs other processes and artifacts, both to support divergent thinking about complex systems and to support convergent thinking to form and validate complex concepts, processes and systems.

2.3. Linking creativity and innovation through design

If creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate, innovation is generally accepted to be the process of translating these ideas into goods or services that generate value or for which customers will pay, or as Steve Jobs once called it, the creativity that ships. More recently, however, this view of innovation as translation from idea to good or service has been challenged, especially in the design world.

For example, the UK Design Council has defined design as the process that shapes creative ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users - creativity deployed to a specific end [DES 11].

Figure 2.1. The relationship between creativity, design and innovation

The obvious interpretation of this definition is that design represents a critical intersection between creativity and innovation - that without design, creative ideas cannot be shaped to become the practical and attractive propositions that users need and want. These relationships are shown in Figure 2.1.

Evidence from reviews of many successful products and services tends to support this view. Many of the products and services that we consume and most people would consider to be creative are the result of substantial design processes - the iPhone, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the FIAT 500 automobile are all creative and innovative, but all have been designed to the nth degree. Indeed, it is difficult to think of many of today's creative products and services that have not been designed in some form.

Therefore, one conclusion to draw from the Design Council's definition of design, creativity and innovation is that enterprise solutions that are to innovate must be designed, with creative ideas as inputs to the design process. Increasingly, business and enterprise solutions must be subject to design processes.

2.4. Service design processes

Service design thinking is a human-centered innovation process that involves observation, collaboration, fast learning, the visualization of ideas, rapid prototyping and concurrent business analysis [LOC 10]. Although design thinking was originally developed to be applied to the design of consumer products such as iPods, shavers, lamps and chairs, and services such as hotel check-in and post office counters, it can also be applied to a wider range of design projects such as business processes for new staff appointments and unloading aircraft activities, and wider socio-technical solutions for air traffic control and awarding parking tickets.

Different definitions of service design have been offered, and most considered it to be an interdisciplinary activity. For example, Moritz in [STI 10] reported that it helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations . a new holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field. Livework, also in [STI 10], described service design as the application of established design process and skills to the development of services. a creative and practical way to improve existing services and innovate new ones. However, one of the most incisive definitions is from the service design studio 31 Volts in [STI 10], which describes it as when you have two coffee shops . selling the same coffee at the same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.

Moreover, Stickdorn and Schneider [STI 10] identified five principles of service design. These principles are:

1. 1) It is user-centered: services should be experienced through customer's eyes using techniques such as observations and walkthroughs of a service from a customer's perspective.
2. 2) It is co-creative: all stakeholders should be included in the creative process, and empowered to generate ideas, contribute to...