Innovative Creativity - eBook

Author: Tom Gilb

A short 106 page booklet.

Do you want to be more creative?

This book focuses on practical tools to help you and your teams generate ideas which will produce real stakeholder value in the short term, early in your projects and long-term. It contains real case studies from our experience of their use.

These ideas have won million dollar prizes, and been used for space and military technology. Many of the tools are based on our Planning Language Planguage. This means our focus is not simply of ‘creating some new idea’. Our focus is on delivering, and engineering, real multiple measurable qualities, and values for multiple stakeholders. We are also focused on multiple costs, short-term capital costs and longer-term running or maintenance costs. 

This book is a treasure of practical ideas for innovative projects, start-up companies and any other endeavor of creating new products and services and even just for training people with comprehensive tools for being more productively creative when they have to.

SOME DEFINITIONS

Practical: people, the intended stakeholders,  will value the results (value and costs) in the real world today.

Purposeful:  is a result of working towards (pre-defined (but possibly modified later), stated in writing, and agreed), objectives and constraints.

Innovative: significant improvements in qualities, values and costs, compared to previously.

• novus: ‘new’, Latin
• but the main shift in thinking here is that, it is not the 'solution ideas' which are 'new' [11]
• it is the 'results for people', that are 'new'
• another term, more specific: is 'Value Innovation'
• my main focus in this book, is not 'innovation' generally, in itself ('new stuff') but it is  'Value(s) levels', that we would like to have, as 'new' in the future.

Creativity (the 'Practical Purposeful' kind): a systematic process, of finding and validating solutions, to a stated problem, regarding better values, and lower costs.

• Solutions do not have to be 'new' at all. [11,12]
• On the contrary they can be, should be, tried and true.
• Solutions just have to form part of a real and effective solution to the stated problem [13].
• The practical creative person pulls in ideas that really work.
• It is especially 'creative' to think of an idea, which is ten times more cost-effective than any colleague, working on the same problem, has thought of.
• This probably means re-using 'ideas, with a history of working well, and being cost-effective.
• This is, I admit,  'engineering', not 'art'. It is the art of engineering the results. Not creating 'unique' art.