Creativity Inside the Box

We live in a world of change. Just look around you, everything is changing. But today, I’m going to talk about another level of change that you probably don't recognize though you actually experience, virtually every day. 

It's the underlying pattern for creativity technique called Attribute Dependency. This is the fifth technique of the Systematic Inventive Thinking or SIT method. 

Many people would argue that this is the most powerful of the techniques. Well, they're all powerful, but this one definitely accounts for most of the innovations out there. And while it may be the most powerful, it's also the most difficult and the most abstract. So there are a few things you need to consider if you want to break fixedness though mastering this technique.

1. Definition of Attribute Dependency
2. How to use the Attribute Dependency technique
3. Benefits of Attribute Dependency
4. Distinguishing attributes vs. components
5. Examples of Attribute Dependency

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Chocolate chip cookies, penicillin, Velcro, the microwave oven, and the game of basketball – what do all of those have in common?

Well, they’re examples of products that have been derived completely by chance. They're called serendipitous products because they've been randomly invented with no underlying creativity structure at all. 

They’re phenomenally popular and very useful. So, does this mean serendipity is a good way to invent products?

1. Why serendipity is relevant
2. Should you rely on serendipity when inventing new products?
3. Examples of serendipitous products and how they got invented
4. Why the Post-It Note is not a great example of innovation
5. A better alternative to inventing products

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Imagine a package of powdered soup, a contact lens, a child's high chair, and an exercise bicycle. 

What do you think these items have in common? 

Each one actually has had something subtracted from them. And that’s what we’re going to discuss today.

Learn how the subtraction technique works in breaking cognitive fixedness. Using this very powerful tool, it forces you to take out an essential element from your product, service, or system and see new benefits you might not have seen before. It helps train you to use your brain in a different way and see new possibilities.

Remember, the SIT method is driven by this idea of our need to break cognitive fixedness, which is the mental bias of how we see things in the world which can make it difficult for us to imagine them in new configurations.

1. What is the Subtraction Technique?
2. Feature Wars: The problem with adding features to your product
3. The benefits of subtraction
4. The common pitfalls and mistakes to avoid when using this technique
5. The steps in a subtraction technique
6. Examples of products using subtraction

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

How does a company like Procter & Gamble take their air freshener product that’s lagging in the market and all of a sudden propel it to first place, adding 20 points of market share in just a matter of four months?

Procter & Gamble assembled a team of marketing and technical people, and they applied systematic inventive thinking, where they particularly used the SIT technique called Multiplication. 

Learn how you, too, can use this technique in your organization! 

1. What is the Multiplication technique?
2. The multiplication steps
3. Uses of the multiplication technique in our world today
4. The dreaded tsetse fly story and the rubber feet story
5. The common pitfalls you need to avoid

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Grab a copy of my book, Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results: https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Box-Creativity-Breakthrough-Results/dp/1451659296

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Once you've embraced this idea that creativity can be systematic, and you've started to invest time and energy learning the Systematic Inventive Thinking or SIT – a very common question for you at this point is – how do you spread what you know to others?

How do you get your boss on board with this? Or how do you try this at your company? 

How do you get the others to see its value, especially in terms of generating growth within the company?

In this episode, I talk about how to run an innovation pilot program. 

Pilot programs are an effective and low-cost way to test new ideas. They help you gain insights around innovation techniques or methods and how those can be applied to different parts of the business. They shed light on what's going on in an organization and how they can help the organization see you as a valuable contributor.

1. What is an innovation pilot program?
2. How to run an innovation pilot program
3. When’s the best time to strike the idea of a pilot program?
4. Why you need to get support from your colleagues and other departments
5. Two things to think about after your program has been approved
6. What to do once the pilot program is done

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Episode 006: Innovation Dream Teams: The Secret Formula to Drive Team Success

https://drewboyd.com/iib006

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Every day, you face at least one situation where a creative idea would come in handy. But there are just times when you feel like nothing comes out of you. 

So what diminishes your creative spark?

It’s actually not because you don't want to be creative, or you don't need to be. 

What blocks creativity is this condition called fixedness.

Fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see the world around us differently than what we're used to. 

Today, let’s take a deep dive into how you can break your fixedness so you can start adding some creativity into your business, your systems and processes, and everyday life.

1. What is fixedness
2. Why it's good
3. The Dunker Candle Experiment
4. The barriers to creative output: 3 types of fixedness
5. The 5 SIT techniques to break fixedness

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Does the SIT method work with services as well?

This is actually the most common single question that I get about innovation and the SIT method.

And the quick answer is, YES!

The Systematic Inventive Thinking or SIT method is not only applicable to products, it’s also highly valuable in process innovation. 

Let's explore how we could apply the SIT method to a service.

The point is to look for opportunities so that we see the structure or function of the process in a different way than we're used to. 

They’re all designed to eventually help us break fixedness, which is that cognitive bias that makes it very difficult for us to imagine configurations other than what we know. 

1. How to apply the SIT method to a service
2. Why process innovation is important
3. The difference between a product and a service
4. The benefits of applying the SIT method to a service or process
5. The Division Technique
6. The Task Unification Technique
7. Some examples of SIT method applied to services

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Does your organization struggle with generating better ideas? Unfortunately, the traditional brainstorming approach doesn't work. 

Innovation is a team sport. You're going to get better and richer innovation when colleagues and other support people around you are involved in generating novel ideas. 

But what types of people should make up your winning team?

In today’s episode, learn how to create innovation dream teams in a systematic way. So that whenever you want to generate ideas, you already know the basic elements needed in pulling together a special combination of talents in the room – and that’s where the magic happens!

1. Steps in creating your ideal innovation team
2. Roles in an innovation dream team
3. The different types of diversity to consider
4. Breaking down functional diversity into 3 parts
5. Why gender diversity is important
6. Why you need to break bigger groups into smaller ones

Group Genius by Keith Sawyer

https://www.amazon.com/Group-Genius-Creative-Power-Collaboration/dp/0465096638

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

With innovation comes resistance. They define each other. An idea can’t be innovative unless it’s met with resistance, so we should see it as a good thing. 

Instead of giving up when we meet resistance, we should figure out how to approach it so that we can then overcome it. This includes knowing what to expect depending on the characteristics of our ideas, the resistors, and ourselves as the innovators. These characteristics will lend themselves to either an increase or a decrease in resistance.

That is what today’s episode is all about. I talk about how to know what kind of resistance to expect and what to do about it.

1. What not to do when trying to overcome resistance.
2. The 3 sources of resistance.
3. 11 factors in the idea itself that could cause resistance.
4. An example of an innovative idea, what kind of resistance that idea would likely meet, and how the company could overcome it.
5. The characteristics that make people more or less likely to reject an idea.
6. The characteristic of the person pitching the idea that determines how much resistance it will meet.

Downloadable scorecard to rate your idea

***

Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Have you ever experienced coming out of brainstorming sessions getting all frustrated because you and your colleagues are always coming up with those same old, crappy ideas?

Good thing I’ve found a great way to generate new ideas and become more creative through the SIT method, which stands for Systematic Inventive Thinking.

Think about how you can be more successful in what you do every day just by being able to generate high-quality ideas in a systematic way – at any time. It's definitely a great way to boost your value, especially within your organization. 

Today, I’m going to talk about the Closed World Principle of Creativity, which is one of the most important principles of the SIT method. 

1. What is the Closed World Principle?
2. Why it’s one of the most important principles of the SIT method
3. How does applying the closed world principle boost creativity?
4. The inverse relationship between the proximity of the problem to the solution and the level of creativity 
5. Imagining an imaginary boundary
6. How you can change the definition of your closed world
7. How you can apply this principle to your business and everyday life

Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Box-Creativity-Breakthrough-Results/dp/1451659296

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com