BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, services or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace. Innovation thus requires coming up with ideas that are original as well as effective and their implementation. Organizations have an increasing demand for these different stages (idea generation, idea selection, and implementation) to be effectively facilitated and for their employees to be supported in being creative and innovative. That is why the Design Thinking methodology has become increasingly popular for innovating companies, universities and colleges to facilitate creativity within complex problems. "Design Thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practitioners […] [to] address a wide variety of personal, social, and business challenges in creative new ways". Thus, Design Thinking complements the innovation process with a focus on and a connection to people's needs. Therefore, the Design Thinking method consists of more than the creativity and implementation phase and covers at least four stages instead. An innovation may cycle through these stages going back to previous ones - called iterations - before complete. The four stages of Design Thinking cover (1) Inspiration, (2) Synthesis, (3) Ideation and Experimentation, and (4) Implementation.

To come up with original ideas during the ideation stage, there are creativity techniques that both facilitate idea generation and increase the ideas' originality. Van Gundy lists more than 100 such ideation techniques. As even creativity handbooks addressing organizational practice merely list ideation techniques without indicating how the techniques' effectiveness towards the quality of ideas might vary, the question of which techniques to choose during the Design Thinking ideation stage remains unanswered. Because creativity is so essential in the "quest for competitive advantage in today's world of quickly changing technologies and dynamic competitors", an intensive one-day creativity training was developed addressing organizations' competitive requirement for innovation and creative ideas. The creativity training is designed to empower employees to become innovators and to inspire them by approaching idea generation in ways different to traditional techniques like brainstorming. The techniques are presented here in a detailed manner so that organizations can immediately implement the tools in-house and without additional external facilitators. This paper focuses on ideation techniques which activate knowledge that is semantically unrelated with the ideation task and thus have the potential to outperform traditional ideation techniques like brainstorming or brainwriting.

The paper is structured as follows: the creativity training is described in detail to facilitate immediate application by facilitators. The creativity training comprises a theoretical summary on innovation and a cognitive model describing S‑CJ ideation techniques that potentially result in more original but still feasible ideas than brainwriting or brainstorming. The techniques are then explained step-by-step. The last section provides a summary of this paper and implications for practical application.