IDEA GENERATION

Idea Generation

Idea lifetime, Creativity, and Incentives

Introduction

Most people, even highly experienced, successful product managers often respond "No!" when they are asked that they are creative or not. Yet concepts are your future, your construction blocks for new products, services, method improvements, and the productions you make to deal those products, services, and processes.

Unfortunately the phrase, "Creative", can conjure up images of painters, poets, and writers, not the usual merchandise manager that is concerned about ROI, charge, launch designs, and sales objectives. In detail, the word "Creative" is often affiliated with the kind of people that have no proficiency to face real enterprise challenges. You may feel that you need to be creative to be successful merchandise manager. I disagree. (Olivier Toubia, 2005)

Even if you are not creative you have the ability to be what I characterise as Ideative, the ability to proactively and frequently produce exclusive and valuable ideas. Creativity is a ability couple of persons are born with but Ideative can be accomplished by anyone eager to extend themselves, discover, and have fun.

Ideative=(Knowledge x Experiences)vivid or I=(K+E)v

Your knowledge multiplied by your experiences to the power of the vividness of your information and familiarity produces ideas. Your job is to increase the dimensions of each of the three variables in alignment to increase the outcome; Ideative. (Levin, 2003)

Remember Lego? Try an trial and glimpse the variety of buildings you can build from just 25 Lego blocks. The options are incredible. Now envisage what you can do with a set of more than 5,000 blocks of varying colors, sizes, and shapes. What if you add other emblems of construction playthings; Robotix or Erector for example? The connectors won't agree, but that's okay; kind is better. Now extend yourself beyond construction playthings to encompass completely unrelated pieces. Add Hot Wheels vehicles, a part of crop, a stapler, and a plaything space suit. Now address all the things you can do by combining these items. You can evolve an endless kind of stuff if you are eager to assemble and blend any thing and everything.

Ideative persons assemble their life's discovering, journeys, discovering, parenting, business, and communal experiences, and combine these "building blocks" in unique configurations. They work intensely to reshape their blocks and add new blocks.

Don't forget to let your mind wander. Some of your best ideas will emerge to you during down time, a vehicle travel, a wash, or while relaxing to music. ...