Creativity Unlimited

Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation

Micael Dahlen

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119187387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Flying in the face of current thinking, this book suggests that we do not need to 'think outside the box' in our quest for creativity, rather we should rethink the way we look 'inside the box'. This idea will resonate only too well with those who have endeavoured to be creative by thinking outside that box, only to have their attempts scuppered by the constraints of bureaucracy and organizational politics. Instead of fighting a losing battle, the author suggests that creativity should be worked at within the constraints of the organizational box, but that space needs to be grown and allowed to be shaken up. Only by experimenting, mutating and finding new directions can you uncover business paths that lead to success. The reader is encouraged not to free themselves from all their knowledge and experiences (the thinking outside the box method) but to use their knowledge and experience in new ways.

The book is structured around three key steps:

• Expanding the box: so that the pieces of the puzzle in it can move around more freely
• Filling the box: with even more knowledge, and how to get these new pieces of the puzzle to connect with the existing ones
• Shaking the box: so that the pieces fall into new places and form new patterns.

The book shows that anybody can be creative.

The creative methods suggested in the book will be linked to real business examples from which techniques have been developed to help their implementation. Numerous exercises and 'eye-openers' form part of the practical implementation of Micael Dahlén's ideas. The book is framed by models and concepts of how creativity works (the creative process, the creative person and the creative result) and what its effects are.

1
Why this book?

It is up to us to train our brains to be strong. Einstein’s brain, for example, was surprisingly small. This book contains creativity exercises that relate directly to business creativity and various business-related problems. In addition, it describes how and why you might use a number of classical creativity exercises.

What is the body’s biggest muscle? A lot of people think it’s the brain, but this is not true. The brain is not a muscle, but like a muscle it can be trained. And although it cannot be flexed like a muscle (it would look rather odd if your head swelled up every time you did some serious thinking, in the way that your biceps increase in circumference when you tense your arm) your brain can be made stronger. This occurs in exactly the same way in which a muscle becomes stronger, namely by creating more connections between the cells.

The thing that distinguishes ‘strong’ brains from others is not that they are bigger, but that they are denser. In spite of the tendency to describe the geniuses and thinkers of the past as having ‘big brains’, research has found no evidence that their brains were particularly large. Einstein ’s brain, for example, was surprisingly small – it weighed a mere 1230 grams, almost one-fifth less than the average brain. A rather comforting thought, isn’t it? We are not, in other words, born with differing potential (‘Lisa was obviously bound to succeed in life, she had such a large brain’). Instead, it is basically up to us to strengthen our brains by training, by maximizing the number of connections between our brain cells (yes, this was the special feature of Einstein’s brain). That is why I have written this book.

My goal is not to strengthen the whole of your brain. Many others have had this goal and many (though not all) have failed to achieve it. Instead, I want to help to make you a better business creator (and this includes chief executives, developers and public sector decision-makers – those whose job it is to create better business opportunities for the Nation/Region Inc.). The work demands only a limited amount of your mental capacity and small improvements can produce big results.

Let us permit ourselves a small digression. In general, it is fair to say that our body, with certain exceptions, has a reasonably constant number of cells. Therefore our muscles do not increase greatly in size when we train them. Any increase that results from training depends mainly on the muscles binding more water and sugar. The reason for the increase in muscle size through training is not the formation of new cells; rather, it is due to the creation of more connections between our current muscle cells. All these connections make the muscle denser (as you know, a well-trained muscle feels harder than an untrained one, just as it is more difficult to squeeze a carrot than a marshmallow).

If you have seen body-builders or athletes at close quarters, you know that their muscles are not actually very big (except during the offseason when they store water and sugar in their muscles, and perhaps some fat as a ‘shock absorber’). Their muscles only look big because they are so dense and well-defined. This is a result of the muscle cells contracting and giving the muscles a definite shape. It is the same with the brain. Whenever I summarize my years of research and teaching, I usually arrive at the conclusion that marketing and business creation (the two are inseparable, which we will come back to later in the book) consist in constantly reinventing oneself. All my research results point to the importance of challenging conventional wisdom and breaking patterns and habits in order to reach out to people, attract their interest and gain unique advantages. Just knowing more than others is not enough. You must also be able to use your knowledge in a new way. All the information stored in the cells of the brain must be combined through new connections.

My research is concerned with developing and testing new opportunities and goals for companies and brands. It might, for example, be a matter of redefining a brand, changing product category, shaking up customer relations or evaluating business results on completely new grounds. This looks promising in theory, but the feedback I have received from companies and experts in marketing and business creation who consider these questions every day of their working lives has indicated that it is not always easy to put these theories into practice. I have therefore spent more and more time developing exercises and ideas about how to put together the challenging results of my research and finding out how, as marketer and business creator, you can continually reinvent yourself.

Trying ‘merely’ to make you more creative is not enough. If it was, I would not be writing this book. Thousands of books on how to increase your creative powers have already been published. While there is always room for further texts on the subject, this book is about creativity and business creation. The difference may be slight, but oh so important. I have read all the books I could find on creativity and have discussed them with students and businessmen. In many respects, we have reached the same conclusion: the most important problem is that most of the books contain valuable and entertaining insights and exercises, but unfortunately often end up as being only ‘entertaining’. The reason such books do not lead to concrete results is due to the fact that the exercises are not directly linked to business creation.

This book presents a collection of exercises that I have partly gathered from elsewhere and partly developed myself. It contains exercises that relate directly to business creativity and various business-related problem scenarios. In addition, it describes how and why you might use a number of classical creativity exercises. This book is in five parts and can be used for a number of different purposes. The book’s Introduction (Parts I and II) is there to provide you with arguments for yourself and others as to why it is important to let both the particular exercises in the book and creativity in general become part of your daily work. The exercises in the middle part (Part III) can be used as regular training to develop your creative powers, and also for warming up in various group contexts and in teaching or as metaphors in your daily work (thinking points). The exercises in the final parts (Parts IV and V) are intended for use directly in your strategy and tactics development to help you to find new angles and develop new solutions and business.

Welcome aboard! Let’s go.

PART I
It’s About Success

In this part:

• Why creativity?
• Are you creative?
• Why is creativity so important?
• Isn’t creativity dangerous?

‘All my research results point to the importance of challenging conventional wisdom and breaking patterns and habits in order to reach out to people, attract their interest and gain unique advantages. Just knowing the most is not enough. You must also be able to use your knowledge in new ways.’

2
Why creativity?

This book is not about luck. It is about how to work systematically with creativity. For the effects are extremely systematic. Creativity is not about taking chances. Creativity is about ensuring success.

Why creativity? Put the question to the state-owned Swedish bank SBAB, which has gone through a radical transformation from the old, established Sveriges Bostadsfinansieringsaktiebolag (Swedish Domicile Financing Ltd) to an aggressive building society with the acronym SBAB. SBAB has totally transformed its business for itself, its competitors and Sweden’s population. Since as recently as 2000, by means of pioneering financial products and marketing programs such as ‘canned’ mortgages and mortgage blogs, the company has almost doubled its market share and tripled its customers. Annual sales have tripled, and according to investment bank Goldman Sachs, the value of the company and the SBAB brand have increased by several billions. Financial services in Sweden will never be the same again.

Another organization that has reaped the harvest of its creativity since 2000 is the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Around the millennium shift, they reformulated a blood pressure medicine and marketed it instead as a man’s best friend. With this creative twist, Viagra was born. It has since been sold for billions – annually.

Why creativity? Ask 3M that question, who like Pfizer managed to create one of the world’s best-known and successful products. By thinking creatively about how to use a glue that did not work, the Post-it note was born. Today it sells more than all the functioning glues the company markets put together.

If you ask the people behind the Swedish free newspaper Metro the same question, you will hear a story of the future that became a reality thanks to a combination of an established product and a new business and distribution model – owing to insights about people’s behaviour patterns and changing habits. The first edition of Metro was distributed in the Stockholm underground in 1995, and within 10 years the free daily had grown to over 60 editions in 19 countries with a readership of more than 18 million.

Apart from their success, these examples have one thing in common. They have been successful by being creative within their existing areas of activity. Instead of looking beyond what they already knew and trying to think up radically new products, they have used and developed their existing products, their know-how and their experience to achieve a creative result. Instead of thinking outside the box they have thought inside the box. Thinking inside the box increases the likelihood of achieving creative results and also strengthens the impact and value of the creativity.

The above examples provide some anecdotal evidence of the enormous power of creativity and the revolutionary effects it can have. The list of examples could be considerably longer (and we will see many examples later in the book), but I do not want to concentrate on indivi...