Before talking about the techniques to create business ideaswe must have something very clear:
What really is leadership and innovation? These two terms have been established as two essential characteristics of successful men and large companies.
However, they have become such common words that their meaning has gone from being relevant to being obvious. Consequently, our ability to understand them and use them to our advantage has been significantly diminished.
Leading is not about creating a vision and inspiring others to execute it. Innovation is not a moment of brilliance where a single individual has a moment of creativity and creates good business ideas.
On our way as entrepreneurs we will find individuals with different visions, characters who view problems from other perspectives. In our role as leaders, we must be clear about how to extract the best of the opinions and how to prepare the space so that other business ideas are not eliminated before being heard; all in order to correctly manage what Linda Hill calls, the collective creativity.
Linda is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and co-author of the book: The art and practice of leading innovation. She has spent a decade closely studying leaders around the world and spotting patterns in their actions.
Linda studied people at Pixar, Google and other big companies in different industries around the world; and she concludes that constant innovation is not given by a moment of inspiration, and even less by a single individual: It requires perseverance and a work team.
So what do companies that innovate over and over again have in common? How to have good business ideas over and over again?
They have 3 characteristics in common that stimulate collective creation; which in turn, become 3 incredible techniques to create business ideas.
3 incredible techniques to create business ideas.
1. Creative abrasion.
Unlike a brainstorm where the participants put aside their judgment; creative abrasion is characterized by creating different ideas but through discourse and debate based on constructive arguments.
Linda says that individuals in innovative organizations know how to inquire, listen. In addition, she is emphatic when she says that they must also know how to defend their points of view; because they are clear that innovation hardly comes without diversity and conflict.
Creative abrasion is being able to create a market of ideas through debate and discourse.
2. Creative agility.
Once you have the ideas, they must be tested and optimized. In creative agility you execute instead of planning. You experiment and learn through trial and error to reach new horizons. And not through pilots, where it seeks to confirm truths.
It is experimented and learned through trial and error, not pilot tests. Click To Tweet
3. Creative resolution.
Linda points out that in innovative organizations, agreements between the parties are not reached by simple commitment. Solutions are proposed that leave the door open to incorporate opposing points of view and do not allow one group to dominate over the others. On the contrary, everything is in favor of testing the solutions of the different proponents.
Great examples of leadership.
At Pixar, Linda says, leaders focus on creating a sense of community and developing creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolve; in order to create a world that people want to belong to and don’t spend their time creating a vision that everyone wants to follow.
They prefer to develop spaces where all employees, regardless of their role, can give input on projects.
Another example is Bill Coughran, former head of Google’s infrastructure group. Bill sees himself as a connector of ideas and not as a dictator of points of view.
He understands very well that others do not want to follow him, others want to co-create the future with him. Companies like Google and Pixar can innovate over and over again because you follow these three rules.
- They solve problems collaboratively.
- They learn by discovery.
- They make integrated decisions.
Don’t look for people to follow you, look for a team to co-create the future. Click To Tweet
Linda concludes that leaders who foster continuous innovation fully understand their role, which is to set the stage but not act on it, so that everyone can be part of the “collective genius.”
Collective creativity and techniques to create business ideas.
If you have imagined having your own company, it is likely that you have tried to create business ideas. You succeeded?
Brainstorming ideas is not a simple process. Sometimes they appear out of nowhere, but it is not the only way. You can create the habit of thinking about multiple business possibilities.
You already know 3 techniques to create business ideas. We hope you can put them into practice. Many successes!
