How Creativizing Can Unlock Innovation
Today’s guest post is by Jeff DeGraff – author of Innovation You (CLICK HERE to get your copy). You can learn more about him at the end of the post.
When I was in second grade, I wanted to be a knight for Halloween. My father, fond of quoting Teddy Roosevelt – “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are” – and never one to throw scraps of any kind away, was eager to help with a homemade get-up. In this case, he took on old plastic bucket, cut a slotted visor and adorned the whole thing with shiny aluminum foil. An old feather duster became a regal red plume. He fashioned a sword from a piece of floor molding that he spray painted gunmetal grey so it looked like a forged blade. My armor was a silver tanning blanket cut up and reconfigured through the miracle of duct tape. By the next morning, I was as chivalrous and gallant as Lancelot himself as I paraded through the halls of my elementary school to the attentive stares of the jealous rabble.
My Dad was a perpetual creativizer. Like so many people with this skill, he was a thoughtful and innovative maker of small moves and little miracles. He could improvise on the spot in the most improbable of situations. On one family camping trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan our car broke down just when we had run out of food, gas and money. What followed was some of his finest work and of more significance to our safety than a crafty costume would ever be. We hitchhiked to the dump to find parts. We went fishing for dinner. We traded food staples with the other campers. We bartered services with gas station owners. One day and four hundred miles later we pulled into our driveway in Kalamazoo. My Mother gave a huge sigh of relief; not my Dad. He knew he had it in the bag the whole way.
Americans have always been resourceful. It’s one of our great cultural gifts bequeathed by ancestors who came here seeking Gold Mountain, fleeing the Czar or shackled in painful manacles. They endured the slums, prejudice and outrageous fortune to give us our sense of destiny. We rely on that can-do attitude more these days. The Great Recession put a lot of things in perspective for most of us. The American dream was never really about owning a jet or living in a house as big the entire neighborhood where you grew up. It’s about getting your friends, family and community over that proverbial bridge – poverty, ignorance, illness and the like. Or in my case, getting us over the mighty Mackinac Bridge to get home.
We see creativizers everywhere. Great product design firms often start the innovation process by building mock-ups with cheap plastic tubing or carving prototypes from a bar of soap. Famously, the Apollo 13 crew and Mission Control brought the spacecraft safely back to earth through the imaginative use of spare parts that would have impressed MacGyver. Successful software firms mash-up code and content from existing products and web sites to quickly determine what is functional and beautiful before they invest in a big plan of action.
Franklin, Edison and Disney are still the heroes of my imagination. But the longer I live the more I appreciate the ordinary person who makes things extraordinary just through their ability to see options, create solutions and gather the resources most of us overlook. We seldom notice them because they conjure up their modest bits of magic everywhere, everyday.
Consider a guy I know who lost his job and palatial home but had the presence of mind to go in on a foreclosed cottage with his brother. Sure there is less room for the family, but they love living on a lake and when the brother comes for a vacation stay the cousins camp out on the back porch. Think about the single mom who wanted to go back to college but didn’t have the test scores to be admitted. So she offered a service to create blogs for busy professors who quickly saw the quality of her mind and opened some doors for her. Maybe it’s the retired auto worker who refurbishes junked bicycles and leaves them out on the sidewalk for any child whose dreams of adventure needs some wheels. They all creativize it. It’s the small innovations that really make a big difference in our lives.
Whether in the research lab of a corporation or in the garage or kitchen of your house, innovation emerges the same way. We build with available materials. We add and subtract. We diversify our approach as we learn what works and doesn’t. We tweak. We keep looking for the answer to present itself. With a little luck and some Krazy Glue we may catch a glimpse of it. Now the chase begins in earnest. And this is the key to it all. The successful innovators we find are not remarkably more intelligent than the ordinary person, but rather, they are significantly more motivated. This can come from necessity, the mother of all invention, or their internal drive to succeed. Either way, both skill and will are required to make innovation happen.
I spend most of my days in the rarefied air of a top flight business school and in the board rooms of the most celebrated corporations in the world. Typically the strategy, structure and systems are focused on the elimination of variation. So they put the good manager in charge of the innovation project who proceeds to institute a one size fits all process that eliminates variation. It worked on previous projects when the aim was improved quality and efficiency. The problem is that innovation requires variation and deviation to make things better and new. It takes deviants like my Dad to make innovation happen. Sadly I see these creativizers everywhere but I seldom see them with any real power or influence. So they continue to do the creative work the company can’t right across the street at the coffee shop or tavern. Maybe it’s time to buy them a drink and talk a little treason.
My Dad is still creativizing at seventy-eight. Every time I visit him he is working on recreating or repurposing something that perhaps you or I might not have a use for. Creativizing requires more than ingenuity, time on our hands, or junk to tinker with. It requires that we look for and then actually see possibilities where others see dead ends; it requires that we remain open to what the world gives us.
– Jeff DeGraff is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. To learn more about his book Innovation You and PBS Special by the same name, visit his web site at www.innovationyou.com or follow his blog on innovation at www.jeffdegraff.com.
Jeff, I read your article and think of those in the northeast struggling with the aftermath of Sandy. I am sure there are creatives there, but you don’t see them on the news. You see people sitting and waiting on someone else to help. I’ve seen it in every natural disaster that comes along. I’ll never forget the image of a man sitting on a box beside the rubble of his neighborhood that had been leveled by a tornado. He held a little cardboard sign that read, “Somebody please help us”. Unlike your father and your family, these people would be sitting on the roadside, thumbs out, waiting for someone to come along and tow the car back to Kalamzoo for free. I pray that there are more of the creatives than those we see and read about in the news. The creatives will be the ones responsible for rebuilding.
Also, I used to know a man like your Dad. His name was Ronnie, and he’s never hired anyone to fix or do anything in his life. If he couldn’t fix it, it couldn’t be fixed. His garage was crammed full of well-kept, well-organized tools, ready for the next project on a broken lawnmower, water heater, or vehicle. It takes a certain passion to be that way. It also takes a willingness to take time, energy, and the lumps of failure. We too often toss out what could readily be fixed because we are unwilling to try. Maybe that’s why obsolescence has become SOP in out society.