Designing Creativity-based Innovation Processes
By: Carlo Giglio
Why is creativity worthy of being brought to stage?
Creativity is recognised as the starting point of many knowledge advancements and innovations, and plays a key role in the development of the knowledge economy. Moreover, knowledge advancements are applied to several technological innovations in different fields. Therefore, creativity represents an emerging topic in the knowledge era and plays a key role in the fields of technology and innovation management. Creativity also implies an economic relevance, which further outlines its significance in the business and innovation fields as well as in the social one.
What is creativity?
Creativity is a complex and multi-faceted concept and it is difficult to provide a comprehensive definition that considers all possible different perspectives of analysis (e.g. corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, psychology and aptitudes).
From a strategic and entrepreneurial point of view, it concerns to what degree a creative output can be considered as a novelty, but also to what degree such a novelty is valuable for customers and stakeholders lato sensu. The value of novelty is one of the determinants playing a key role in consumer behaviour and stakeholder belief, thus affecting the success of the end result of an innovation process. In short, it is not only a question of distance to the creative output from the existing products/processes (in terms of difference among the old and the new ones); also the value of such a difference does matter. As a matter of fact, whatever the degree of novelty, a creative output (i.e. an idea) should not be an end in itself. It should allow to produce something new, but also something useful.
From an attitudinal and psychological perspective, the creative output is affected by some features and qualities of thinking like flexibility, tolerance and acceptance of unpredictability. In this context, the focus is on idea generation processes geared to solve problems with an alternative approach. Creativity is intended to be an original way to observe reality, thus leading to unprecedented, innovative solutions.
What is the role of creativity in the innovation process?
Creativity mainly acts in the first stage of the innovation process, which is the concept generation phase (Fig. 1). Creativity is a necessary condition to innovate, since it is impossible to generate an innovation without determining a new and useful concept compared to the existing ones.
The level of creative effort and effectiveness in the starting phase also affects the degree of radicality of the upcoming innovation: the more creative the concept, the more radical the resulting innovation is likely to be.
The appearance of creativity in a subsequent step, by contrast, is influenced by existing knowledge; the more consolidated the knowledge utilised in the starting of the process, the more incremental the resulting innovation is likely to be.
How does the Double Diamond Design Process Model work?
The Double Diamond Design Process Model (DDDPM) has been developed by The British Design Council. It is based on a kind of randomised controlled trial on the analysis of successful innovation design processes adopted in several leading companies operating in different industries worldwide. Therefore, it considers different ways and perspectives regarding the innovation design process, and is able to capture key factors and characteristics that different highly skilled process designers have in common. Hence, such a process model is very flexible, since it can be applied to different contexts. The design process suggested by the Double Diamond consists of four phases (Fig. 2) mapping a double cycle of divergent-convergent stages:
- Discover: this is the starting point of the innovation process and is triggered by novelty ideas. They typically emerge when group members look at things from a new perspective, look for inspiration and collect information. The discovery phase is characterised by exploratory efforts and divergent thinking of group members. The design team must be open-minded and adopt a broad perspective in order to achieve the main goal, which is understanding and satisfying customer needs;
- Define: this phase is geared to align the output of the previous phase to business objectives. In particular, creative concepts are prioritised and filtered, hence only the most useful ones are taken into account and developed. It is a convergent stage where actionable tasks are detailed (e.g. sign-off of the final concept, approval of design and development goals, and definition of project management activities);
- Develop: this phase is linked with the development and testing of design-led activities defined in the second stage. This is another creative and divergent phase relying on the adoption of an open-minded and multi-disciplinary approach, which is geared to refine existing concepts by means of brainstorming, visualisation, prototyping and testing activities;
- Deliver: the last phase is a convergent phase, since its main goal is the launch of the resulting innovation into the market. A final testing before the launch is performed together with evaluation and feedback sessions in order to inform future projects.
The DDDPM describes a linear process and emphasizes the relevance of design in innovation processes. The British Design Council started working on industrial design objects, thus developing a model related to physical products, which should not be changed after public release. Additional changes to tangible products would be expensive and may be unfeasible.
Intangible innovations (e.g. services and software), by contrast, represent a very relevant quota of today’s innovation process outcomes. Therefore, the need for adapting the DDDPM emerges. Feedback sessions between the four phases (Fig. 3) would make changes easier and cheaper to be realised.
About the author:
Carlo Giglio
Carlo Giglio is a postdoc researcher at the University of Calabria. Since 2012, he mainly works in the innovation management, creativity and education, and innovation & design fields. He was responsible for social innovation R&D projects funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and was a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen. Currently, he is a program committee member of international conferences, lecturer on innovation management and project management, and co-principal investigator for the international research project GUESSS (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey).
Credit: 51st issue of the ESTIEM Magazine
You can now read the whole 51st issue on the ISSUU Platform.
