Innovation - From Intuition to Creation

Creative Strategy: A Guide for Innovation is a new book written by William R. Duggan is senior lecturer in business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School.

It is a “how to” book to go from innovation to implementation.  The book presents a 3-step method for innovation, reasoning that it aligns with the way the brain works: breaking up a problem in to components, searching for solutions in several other industries for comparable challenges and ultimately, producing innovative combinations.

Duggan starts by promoting a written problem statement, retaining the statement in a draft version, because as you work through the process you uncover information {that will lead|that moves you to change the statement. The 3-step process includes: rapid appraisal, the “what-works” scan, and creative combinations.

It’s a classic case of “theory to practice.” My previous book, Strategic Intuition , laid out the theory. It explained the science of how creative ideas happen in the human mind and documented how successful innovators actually came up with their innovations. This new book, Creative Strategy , is the practice: it shows how to apply that theory as an innovation method yourself. Here’s how it works: you start with a problem or situation where you aim for an innovation, break that down in to elements of the problem, and then search for precedents that solve each element. You then see a subset of these precedents come together in your mind as a new combination that solves the problem. That idea is your innovation. You start the book with a history tracing the last few decades of discoveries in neuroscience. What does the new neuroscience have to do with creative strategy? I was surprised to discover that 99 percent of innovation methods that people use today are based on a model of the brain that neuroscientists abandoned more than a decade ago.

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Highlights by David Willden