The process of creation...

Once an opportunity has been identified through Insight Platform activities, ideas must be generated to take advantage of those opportunities. There are many techniques used to "brainstorm" a range of possible ideas, but I start with the notion that ideas can be stimulated and come at anytime (the morning shower perhaps?) and each company should have a way to capture these ideas on an ad hoc basis. There are many tools that can be applied to a company's intranet to do so, including MindMatters http://www.us-mindmatters.com/ and Imaginatik http://www.imaginatik.com/ A deeper review of sophisticated innovation tools can be found in MIT's Sloan Management Review article on the topic titled Capturing the Real Value of Innovation Tools. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2006/winter/09/

Then there is the tools to be used when creation process must be stimulated. I believe the best idea generation is done in a social context, with individuals sharing, challenging and building on each others' ideas, as in an Innovation Summit. I offer as a source Chuck Frey's Innovation Tool Blog http://www.innovationtools.com/Weblog/innovation-weblog.asp which is a resource for interesting approaches. the Institute for the Future's Innovation Tool blog http://future.iftf.org/2005/01/innovation_tool.html where unique ideas and approaches to brainstorming are outlined.

Beyond these tools is the notion of Co-Creation with suppliers, customers, and even, sometimes, competitors. The premise, of course, is that collaborative development sparks creativity, ensures a closer fit with customer wants and needs, and improves the success rate for new offers.

Using the three Launch Platforms described earlier to understand where co-creation can take place in the innovation process, including: Insight into new opportunities, Creativity in putting together compelling offers to meet those opportunities, and Value Capture to bring those offers to market in a profitable way. In thinking about co-creation, the issue is how best to engage with customers, partners, and potentially even competitors in each platform.

The Creation Platform is where significant results can be achieved using co-creation. Tech companies actually co-create customized solutions with individual customers every day, but moving from those one-offs in the field to a more systematic approach to broader offer development is still more theory than practice. It is really hard for companies to get past their product-based approach which runs counter to the more collaborative, start-with-the-problem ideal of co-creation. You can hear more about my thoughts on the topic of co-creation on a podcast done at the recent Columbia Univerity Innovation Marketing Conference in New York by going to http://www.launchinstitute.com/.

So what more should we be considering in the creation process? What experiences are there with the involvement of customer, suppliers, etc. in the creation process?