How do you plan a training in Creativity?
You must analyze a training program from a short questionnaire:
1- How much is it like the job or task you are trying to prepare for?
It is not about learning how to operate a system, configure it, etc. then the training should consist of exactly that and the certification in verifying it.
2-What are we improving with this course? What specific benefit does the student and / or his company obtain?
3- What does the participant do during the course? Listen, read? Or does?
4-What is it capable of doing after the program that it was NOT capable of doing before?
Then you have to use a combination of three strategies: A publication in a company newsletter, apply e-learning and complement it with a face-to-face meeting with the most motivated.
And remember that the more the teacher talks, the less the students learn. Students must do, do and do. Not just listen.
And ask: Where would you be if you could choose?
If they answer that they would rather be in the gym or with their family, don't doubt that mentally they are in the place they chose, even though their body is sitting in front of you.
Why do you think that, like never in the history of humanity, creativity and innovation are being talked about ?
There is a return to man as the center of things, consequently the business world is not alien to this, and they are making use of the differential and inexhaustible element of the human being, creativity.
Furthermore, the preeminence of knowledge over other factors of production is underlined. And what is valued from this knowledge is not what has already been accumulated, but what is to come.
There are more scenarios where to exhibit these creativity and innovation skills and new real and virtual spaces are opened, where each one seeks to show their own and share it.
They exist in the world of organizations, from growing demands to extreme pressures, to differentiate themselves and generate novelty in products, services and businesses in general.
The accessibility to information and the possibility of connecting seemingly indifferent worlds operate as a natural fertilizer for ideas. And ideas are like seeds scattered in the wind that germinate fast in fertile soil.
Avant-garde companies are aware that with sufficient capital it is possible to duplicate a competitor's product in a very short time, on the other hand, those creative and innovative organizations naturally maintain a competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate, since cultures cannot be copied without first have analyzed the context of the country.
Consequently, it is very natural that the creativity and innovation factor have received a tremendous boost from the hand of capital, the reason is simple today creativity and innovation is paid, so you can spend time and live from it, being creative is worth the redundancy.
In fact, if you look closely at companies, you will see that they work on continuous improvement and Quality procedures, but what is determining is Innovation and the culture that are difficult to copy.
In short, Innovation has become the core business or key activity of your company.
What are the strategies that you use the most to stay creative, both individually and within the context of the company?
Individually, as I am very dispersed, I take advantage of this deficiency and transform it into creative strength and manage different activities by recombining them.
I read, listen and see everything. From science, cartoons, various blogs, and changing newspapers and magazines frequently.
From there I take concepts and try to apply them to different situations.
The freshness of children makes us see the invisible and imagine nonsense. You simply have to have the freedom to explore the ridiculous and fail in those combinations, so that every now and then a valid idea emerges.
I try to be present and awake, located in the now as much as possible and not flying in the past or the musings of the future, this helps me to be clean and receptive to what surrounds me.
As I achieve this not an easy position in our cultures, I try to absorb information, elements and histories of disciplines, professions and cultures outside my own.
To a large extent, I study creativity and innovation by extrapolating experiences and building bridges between apparently dissimilar projects.
Only then did I let myself fly into the future projecting an idea. I try as much as possible to keep in mind that excellent ideas that are not realized, is not innovation. And that something without added value for your company or users is not innovation.
In companies I use the most appropriate tools for each inconvenience, situation or problem, like someone who takes tools from the carpentry workshop.
Creativity is having many ideas of value but if they are not used they are of little use. I would say nothing.
Innovating is doing something profitable and entering the market, defining the Who and What of your users.
In everyday life in companies there are many sources of inspiration; in the exchange of ideas; in own and others' need; in dreams and wishes; in the activity itself; in the desire to make our contribution; in the technology; in what is missing; in what does not conform…
And to listen permanently, what it is to “listen to both poles”: to the young people and the experienced adults of each sector, because the young people are not yet contaminated, they are free-minded, and at the other pole the experienced know the culture and if they continue to want to do things, with projects, that is ideal.
The important thing in companies is to promote ideas and the owners of the ideas, be with them, show them, motivate them, support them, it is frustrating and sad to see some ideas covered, filtered, and in some cases, what is worse, owned by fears shift.
Do you admire someone especially for their creativity characteristics in the business field?
I admire some entrepreneurs for the ability to bring creatives together under one vision, but in practice they are not the ones who create but are part of the creative team.
But I prefer to think of organizations, some of them like Apple, GE, American Express, 3 • M, Procter & Gamble, Google, among many others, that innovate in vision, management and human capital respectively.
Is there any innovation or creative action that has surprised you lately?
It caught my attention a few years ago that an American citizen wrote a book with clues to find a treasure of USD 1,250,000. The clues were real and so was the treasure, and the book's author raised more than $ 2 million from the publication, paying for the treasure and creating his travel business.
I was very surprised by the simplicity and at the same time the strength of the idea.
And on the other hand, I really admire the creativity when it comes to communicating about people and companies. I was surprised by the advertising creative who in 2008 pasted a sticker on the rear window of the car of the owner of a major North American agency, who upon seeing it through the rear-view mirror read: "What are you waiting for to hire me?" And he left his phone… simple, effective and ingenious!
In our country I remember a few years ago some young people from Telén, Chubut, who from a secondary-level science fair, had obtained flour suitable for celiacs, people who cannot eat cereals, and made cheaply from alpataco.
So transcendent was this result that National Geographic magazine echoed it and there were numerous inquiries from the country and some from abroad.
But there was no financial support and the project remains truncated.
What is the main thing in innovation?
In Innovation there must always be the concept of Value Chain developed by Michael Porter.
That is, by changing the furniture I am NOT innovating, I am in any case giving myself a treat.
The value chain implies that when we develop a product or service, we have to aim to generate value for our client.
To identify where or how we can generate value, Porter develops a graph that gives guidelines on where we are innovating, and that we must not lose sight of this objective by placing all our energies there.
In other words, we innovate to create value in an internal process or in a product or service of a user.
The concept of creativity is open and consists of thinking while the concept of innovation is always dependent on the generation of added value.
Antón Chevoj said that ideas and knowledge are worthless if they are not applied in society, and I fervently adhere to this.
Although in my particular concept creativity is linked to thinking and having many ideas but with added value.
Are there conceptual differences between Creativity, Innovation and Invention?
To create is to think of something new of value for a third party, to innovate is to make what you thought reach the market or have a differential added value.
To innovate you must inevitably create wealth.
Innovation is a process where there are five levels of development and only the last level is of invention itself.
If an invention does not create wealth or reaches the market, then it remains an invention and does not become an innovation.
But Innovation, even if it is something new, also has different degrees of novelty. They are three to know.
The first degree is given in incremental innovation, which is one where there are small improvements as in the case of razors with one blade, two, three and now with five blades, at different cutting angles.
The second degree occurs in radical innovation where it is already something very different from what is known, for example think of the cloning of Dolly the sheep, which was the first cloned animal and established a break with what was previously known.
The third grade is given in revolutionary innovations such as the development of computing, which create and apply hundreds of new technologies such as television, telephony, the entertainment industry, tourism, the Internet, chatting, the publishing industry, virtual universities, etc.
Think about the impact of the Human Genome project on medicine, education, insurance companies, etc.
Is there a creative nose?
Yes definitely, creative flair and strategic focus are irreplaceable.
Let's see, man went beyond the good sense of smell that animals have, he has that talent to discover what is sometimes known as a good nose for business or the ability to successfully perform a difficult task as exemplified in the nose of the scorer.
For Plato the beginning is the most important aspect of the work. The creative entrepreneur has the gift of shaping ideas by making things happen by turning ideas into initiatives, plans, and projects.
In any profession, we must mobilize spiritual energy, convert spirit into matter, discovering with self-knowledge what it is that we are so passionate about as to make it the axis of our life.
To achieve this, we must add knowledge + action + social intelligence.
From the interaction between knowledge and facts, ideas are born and from this gymnastics the opportunity arises, which is the invention of a solution for a problem discovered by being at the right time in the right place.
It is not about chance but about good luck, about learning to turn daily events into a source of opportunities. For Pasteur chance only favors prepared minds and for Einstein imagination is more important than knowledge. To summon knowledge, information and chance, we must not wait for them passively, we must go to meet them through fluid contact with reality. What I am and what I do must be connected with who they are and what others do.
For example, when writing, participating in an exhibition, attending congresses, traveling, exchanging data, participating in forums, etc., the breeding ground is generated to develop an entrepreneurial nose.
Interaction is essential, of hundreds of ideas only one is successful, but you have to produce hundreds for one to succeed.
Bernard Shaw said that the reasonable person adapts to the world and the unreasonable person adapts the world to it: progress depends on the unreasonable person.
The third factor is social intelligence: tell me who you hang out with and I'll tell you who you are. The entrepreneur is not left alone with his resources, his open attitude and his relationships, he always has a project in mind. For Seneca there are no favorable winds for those who do not know which port they want to reach.
However, not all actions or ideas are favorable to achieve the objective.
To develop a creative sense of smell, you have to learn in action, continuous feedback with reality is what prevents mistakes from becoming habits.
The successful entrepreneur is the one who learned to breathe, to inhale the smell of information and to exhale the perfume of knowledge, to make his initiatives move through the correct channels, to turn the customer's need into the desire for the product or service that he offers. In the adventure of creating his personal marketing, he understood that a need cannot be created, that you cannot row against the current, but that you can turn a need into a desire knowing that desire is born from a need.
The thirst exists, we must make the desire choose our solution rather than that of a competitor.
The creative nose represents wisdom and arises from the interaction between increased capacity through knowledge and practice, with creativity and innovation that arise from the modeling of a creative brain.
The strategic approach recycles the process from which ethics cannot depart and must answer these questions: where was I yesterday, where am I today, where do I want to be tomorrow and how will I go about achieving it?
What is the difference between TRIZ, ARIZ, Chemistry and algorithms?
TRIZ is inventive problem solving theory, which uses methods and tools, as well as theory.
ARIZ is an algorithm within TRIZ, and the best known version is ARIZ 85, which contains about 95 sequential steps with precise instructions. One of them is not to skip steps.
Chemical phenomena correspond to Chemical Science and use methods, algorithms and techniques analogous to TRIZ.
An algorithm is a procedure to analyze a substance or a problem and is used in mathematics, chemistry, physics, TRIZ, etc.
What do businesses depend on against innovative strategies?
There is a concept from Peter Drucker, who says that business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation, because both produce results, and everything else is cost.
So you will have to get your innovative product to market efficiently and that is achieved with an innovative strategy.
Do you remember any historical innovative strategy?
Hannibal was a great warrior, but he also had a very trained entourage of engineers and it is said that when marching on Rome, the few Roman armies placed large stones on the access roads to collapse parts of mountains.
Hannibal selected his men and had them pour water into the crevices of all the stones, which froze overnight and left the stones reduced to rubble, which was easily removed.
If you look at all the development of civilization is based on old ideas that were improved and new paradigms were created.
In 430 BC Democritus already wrote that everything is made up of atoms. Life, evolution and innovation are an accommodation and optimization of something already pre-existing.
A mouse, an elephant, man, an ant, a stone, a computer, and everything on our planet is made up of atoms, but in an incredible variety of sizes, weights, textures, colors, and behaviors.
Only recombined in infinite different varieties.
Actually the entire history of civilization from the fire, the wheel, the toy cart that was made for the emperor's son in 1600, until the moon landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 at 4:17:42 a.m. from the east, EVERYTHING was done with new ideas improved on old ideas.
Shakespeare took the old stories of the Middle Ages and created new dramas and invented some 1,700 new words. Of course, only a genius takes the old and improves it to create something different and successful.
Why did it start with creativity and end with TRIZ?
For years I researched and studied the literature on Creativity, Innovation and Invention and only in recent years was I able to find out which tools are the most successful and appropriate to solve domestic and industrial problems in processes, products and services.
My training came from engineering, science and quality standards, but when working on projects and in non-governmental organizations, trying to transmit and apply something as elusive as Creativity, the tools I had in hand did not satisfy me.
This is how a first course on the Generation and Development of creative ideas was created that studies the main divergent and convergent tools and techniques to solve problems and conflict situations, and where it is important to have all the possible alternatives, before executing a consensual action on the problem.
From there, going up to the next step was something natural and a second course on Analysis of creative ideas and Innovation of products and services was born, where other creative techniques are used with variants and attachments, but with the same principles and their application to the Market.
The third course is The Art of Inventing in Products, Services and Processes and practically only here I deeply understood that there is a systematic logic in all the inventions of humanity, and that TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving, is the most complete and used in front-line companies.
I am currently defining a final book on Product Design and Innovation with practical exercises carried out for Product improvements.
You can be very intuitive, imaginative and dedicated, but companies need to improve and quickly create products that eliminate contradictions and optimize their performance, and this is only possible following a systematic theory that defines in an algorithm, the best strategy to solve the different problems.
That is to say, intuition and imagination are important but if and only if they find it with systematic and adequate theories, and working with the problem and solving it step by step.
TRIZ is based on successful products and information from patents, inventions and developments, that is, it is based on human knowledge accumulated by the patent and invention offices.
It is a way of thinking directed towards the area of greater solutions to your problem that makes it effective.
It is in line with the Knowledge Management that most world-class companies implement.
