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Creativity

Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For

July 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Corn flakes were born (1894) when the Kellogg brothers inadvertently left a pot of boiled wheat overnight on a stove. They passed the flaky dough through bread rollers and baked the flakes to create a crunchy snack.

Always Be Ready to Discover What You're Not Looking For The Penicillin mold was discovered (1928) by Sir Alexander Fleming, who, upon returning from a vacation, saw a Petri dish that he had left behind without disinfecting. That Petri dish had a zone around an invading fungus where his Staphylococcus bacterium culture had not grown. A mold spore from another lab in the building had accidentally fallen on this culture. The spore had grown while Fleming was away. Rather than throw the dirty Petri dish away, he isolated the mold and identified it as belonging to the Penicillium genus, which kills bacteria by inhibiting new cell walls.

The microwave oven was invented (1945) unintentionally during an experiment by Percy Spencer of Raytheon Corporation. Electromagnetic waves from a new vacuum tube melted a chocolate bar in his pocket while standing next to a magnetron.

Viagra had been developed (1989) as the chemical compound sildenafil citrate to treat hypertension and angina pectoris. Researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials that the compound was good for something else. It was approved for medical use in 1998.

Serendipity is a rich idea that is very central to the creative process. Lots of ideas evolve when you’re working on something unrelated. Physiologist Julius H. Comroe Jr. once said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”

Idea for Impact: Creativity is a disorderly journey. Much of the time, you may never get where you’re going. You may never find what you hope to find. Yet still, you must stay open to the new and the unexpected.

Explore how to transform serendipitous ‘mistakes’ into breakthroughs.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  2. Ideas Evolve While Working on Something Unrelated
  3. The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity
  4. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Business Stories, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Creativity, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Luck, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools

Don’t Try to Convince Every Potential Customer

June 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Many entrepreneurs believe that their innovation is so unique and valuable that the whole world will want it, and if a potential customer won’t get it within seconds, it’s only a question of hammering it into their heads.

Don’t try to convince every potential customer to buy your product or service. If they get your innovation within, say, three minutes—excellent. If not, move on.

As you go about selling your product or service in the early stages of your business, you may find specific customers who will get what you’re doing. They’ll cheerfully buy your solution if they could be convinced that your solution can solve a problem they have (or if you can help them recognize a problem that they have but don’t see it yet.)

If you’re starting out, such customers will be your early adopters. At this stage, they’re the ones that are your biggest fans (or critics) and can be an enormous asset for gaining traction by word-of-mouth.

Idea for Impact: Instead of misusing your marketing efforts on convincing all those who don’t get it and may never get it, laser-focus on identifying, courting, and engaging the early adopters.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?
  2. The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage
  3. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  4. The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Leadership, MBA in a Nutshell Tagged With: Creativity, Customer Service, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Thinking Tools

Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

April 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Arthur Fry conceived the Post-It to bookmark the songs in hymnal In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver: Inventors of the Post-it Note The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Creativity---It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the Post-it Note

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Stimulate Group Creativity // Book Summary of Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’
  2. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas
  3. How You See is What You See
  4. 3 Ways to … Manage for Creativity
  5. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head

Filed Under: Business Stories, Sharpening Your Skills, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Networking, Problem Solving, Teams, Thinking Tools, Thought Process

The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity

January 28, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When most folks encounter a problem, an inconvenience, or an unpleasant situation, they’ll assume these problems are “facts of life” and go on with their lives. At the most, they may even lament about it to others.

Not attentive entrepreneurs. They tend to identify problems and construe them as opportunities.

Miki Agrawal - Disruptive Entrepreneur

Serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal tells the story of how she started WILD, New York City’s first gluten-free pizzeria, after becoming increasingly intolerant to processed foods:

It all started in 2005 when I started having recurring stomachaches. I realized I was intolerant to all of the additives, hormones, and pesticides that were being put in American mass-produced food. At the time, I had given up my favorite comfort food, pizza. In 2006, I opened WILD in New York City to offer people the best version of a pizza: made with organic, gluten-free flours & tomato sauces, and hormone-free cheeses & meats.

During that time, everyone thought “gluten-free,” “farm-to-table,” and “organic” meant “must taste like cardboard,” so it took a lot of education to get people to “get” it.

Embedded in Agrawal’s narrative is a great entrepreneurial thought lesson: You, too, can become better at recognizing unrevealed opportunities by learning to spot the subtle clues all around. The key question to ask is, “This product should already exist, why doesn’t it?”

Learn to Spot Hidden Business Opportunities

Besides WILD, Agrawal has applied the same ingenuity to found two other successsful businesses called THINX underwear and TUSHY bidet accessories.

Learn to spot hidden, disruptive business opportunities

Answer the following questions to check if some problem you’re aware of serves as a business idea worth exploring:

  • What’s appalling in your personal or professional world?
  • Is this thing so terrible that you want to do something about it?
  • Does this bother any person but you just as much?
  • Your proposed solution should already exist, but why doesn’t it?
  • Could this solution be worth something for others who are dealing with similar problems?

Idea for Impact: “Fix-What-Sucks” Business Opportunities are Everywhere

All you have to do is look around your own life and find something that has been broken, and then fix it. Extend and expand. The world is always seeking better, faster, cheaper, and smarter ways to solve its problems.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Make ‘Em Thirsty; or, Master of the Art of the Pitch
  2. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  3. Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For
  4. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Creativity, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools, Winning on the Job

What the Duck!

December 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rubber Duck Debugging - There’s a popular technique among programmers called “rubber duck debugging:” put a rubber duck (or a cardboard cutout of a dog) next to your computer, and whenever you get stuck, you talk to the duck.

Yes, you talk your problem and walk your code with that inanimate object. And you perpetuate the stereotype that we geeks are a socially awkward bunch.

“Showing It to Someone Else” isn’t just a way of telling the other what you think; it’s a way of telling yourself what you think. Just the act of slowing down and explaining your problem and its context can bring about a moment of illumination.

Rubber duck debugging is related to what psychologists call “incubation.” The best solutions can strike suddenly and unexpectedly when you aren’t actively working on your problem. Think of Archimedes and his Eureka moment.

Idea for Impact: Talking is often a part of thought. After many failed attempts, switching your brain from problem-solving to problem-explaining—even to a cat, parent, sympathetic coworker, or somebody who may not know much about whatever it is that’s bothering you—can break you free from fixation and trigger creative breakthroughs.

Hat tip to reader Nick Ashcroft.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. How You See is What You See
  3. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

Filed Under: Mental Models Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Parables, Problem Solving, Thinking Tools, Thought Process

Fail Cheaply

November 19, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

E-Fan X wind tunnel test model (Courtesy: Airbus)

One way to accelerate innovation is to undertake low-risk experiments.

Failures in the innovation process can be costly and time-consuming. It’s often wiser to try low-risk, low-cost, high-payoff experiments than ruminating endlessly.

Make your experiments cheaper. You don’t need to create a full-scale concept to test it. Find low-cost ways to test your assumptions. It may take time and iteration to find what works for you.

  • Engineers often use surrogate modeling techniques that use simple prototypes and mock-ups that are as representative as possible.
  • Counter to the phrase “it takes money to make money,” shrewd entrepreneurs know how to experiment multiple ways for minimal cost. Next, they scale up one or two experiments that have given them favorable results. The losses are small, and the potential gains much larger.

Idea for Impact: The worst way to fail is slow and big. Don’t eliminate failure. Only reduce the cost of failure.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Loss Aversion Mental Model: A Case Study on Why People Think Spirit is a Horrible Airline
  2. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?
  3. The Myth of the First-Mover Advantage
  4. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  5. How to Guard Against Anything You May Inadvertently Overlook

Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Change Management, Creativity, Decision-Making, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Risk, Strategy

Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”

November 2, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Designer Gillis Lundgren of IKEA In the mid-1950s, Gillis Lundgren (1929–2016) was a draftsman living in a remote Swedish village of Älmhult. He was the fourth employee of a fledging entrepreneur named Ingvar Kamprad.

Kamprad’s business was called IKEA, an acronym combining his initials and those of his family’s farm and a nearby village. He had founded IKEA in 1943 and got his start selling stationery and stockings at age 17. In the 1950s, Kamprad had launched a low-cost mail-order furniture retailer to cater to farmers.

Constraints have played a role in many of the most revolutionary products

IKEA Flatpack Revolution - Gillis Lundgren's Lovet Table In 1956, Lundgren designed a veneered, low coffee table. He built the table at home but realized that the table was too big to fit into the back of his Volvo 445 Duett station wagon. Lundgren cut off the legs, packed them in a flat box with the tabletop, and rushed to a photoshoot for the IKEA furniture catalog.

And in so doing, Lundgren unintentionally birthed the flatpack furniture industry. He modified his simple design and drew up plans for a disassembled version of the table. Lundgren’s Lövet table (now called Lövbacken) became IKEA’s first successful mass-produced product.

IKEA and Its Flatpacking Took Over the World

IKEA’s trademark, easy-to-follow assembly instructions are a central ingredient to the company’s success. Manufacturing and distributing prefabricated furniture via flatpacking has proved enormously successful. It has dramatically facilitated the shipment and storage of pieces that otherwise took up much more space.

'Leading By Design The Ikea Story' by Bertil Torekull (ISBN 0066620384) According to Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design—The IKEA Story (1998,) the concept of ready-to-assemble furniture is much earlier than that. But IKEA was the first to systematically develop and sell the idea commercially.

Flatpacking contributed to many of IKEA’s products’ enduring popularity—they’re affordable, sleek, functional, and brilliantly efficient. In 1978, Lundgren designed the iconic Billy bookcase, the archetypical IKEA product that currently sells one in three seconds.

IKEA’s aesthetic of simplicity and efficiency reflects in its exclusive design and marketing approach. IKEA constantly questions its design, manufacturing, and distribution to create low-cost and acceptably good products.

The method has been adopted by numerous other business enterprises, transforming how products are made and sold globally.

Constraints Inspire Creativity - How IKEA Started the 'Flatpack Revolution'

Out of Limitations Comes Creativity

One problem with creativity is that sometimes people face an open field of creative possibilities and become paralyzed. Constraints can be the anchors of creativity [see more examples here, here, and here.]

Constraints fuel rather than limit creativity. Use constraints to break through habitual thinking and promote spontaneity. The mere experience of playing around with different constraints can stretch your imagination and open your mind’s eye for ingenuity.

Idea for Impact: Use constraints to help stimulate creativity. As the British writer and art critic G. K. Chesterton once declared, “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. How You See is What You See
  3. Always Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For
  4. Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Business Stories, Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Adversity, Artists, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Entrepreneurs, Innovation, Parables, Problem Solving, Resilience, Thinking Tools

Avoid Being the Low-Priced Competitor

October 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In determining how much you’ll charge for your products and services, explore the “price umbrella”—how others are charging for competitive or comparable products.

The key to pricing is knowing how much your service is worth for your client. Charge too little, and you’re short-changing yourself and making your client speculate, “If she’s decent, why does she charge so little?”

Avoid being a low-price competitor. It’s a terrible habit. Don’t announce, “I’m new. I’m trying to get established. Therefore, I’m offering my service for less than the existing players. Please buy from me.”

Avoid Being the Low-priced Competitor Jim Price, an entrepreneurship lecturer at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and author of The Launch Lens: 20 Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask (2018,) calls this “apologetic pricing.”

Instead, consider the “proud pricing” approach: “We’re launching this business because we firmly believe in our unique value proposition; we look forward to explaining that to customers and charging a premium price for a superior product.”

Positioning yourself as the low-price market offering is a competitive strategy that tends to only work for large, undifferentiated retailers and similar businesses, and it is a poor prescription for entrepreneurial startup success.

Being the low-priced competitor tends to require massive operational and financial scale and often results in an undifferentiated product or service offering and a business with very narrow profit margins.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get stuck in the race to the bottom to be cheaper. Marketing expert Seth Godin has reminded, “Cheaper is the last refuge of the marketer unable to invent a better product and tell a better story.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Leo Burnett on Meaning and Purpose
  2. Fail Cheaply
  3. Clever Marketing Exploits the Anchoring Bias
  4. Beware of Key-Person Dependency Risk
  5. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?

Filed Under: MBA in a Nutshell Tagged With: Career Planning, Creativity, Entrepreneurs, Marketing

How to Create Emotional Connections with Your Customers

September 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consumers are shifting towards memorable experiences over material objects that bring happiness and well-being. Experiential consumption is increasing—the global spending on travel, leisure, and food service is estimated to grow from $5.8 trillion in 2016 to $8.0 trillion by 2030.

Businesses are responding by offering indulgences (think Apple products,) enhancing shopping experience (ordering and carrying-out Domino’s Pizza,) and creating more intimate experiences (Mastercard’s Priceless campaign) for consumers.

Persil Laundry Detergent - 'Dirt is Good' campaign One particularly edifying case study is Unilever’s Persil brand of laundry detergents (Unilever licenses this brand from Henkel in many countries.) As part of the “Dirt is good” campaign, Persil’s sentimental adverts that remind “learn to be a kid” (clip,) “climb a tree, break a leg … that’s part of life” (clip,) and “dirt makes us equal” (clip) have attempted to connect with consumers emotionally.

Persil bucked the longstanding ritual of creating dull adverts for its dull products (cheery moms grabbing washing baskets and fragrant flowers and butterflies rising from the clean laundry.) Persil doesn’t focus on the detergent’s stain-busting attributes. Instead, Persil’s campaign signals that children must feel free to experience the world around them regardless of the impact on their clothes. One prominent advert (clip) presented a cheerless robot who slowly transforms into a child while playing in the open air and splashing around in a muddy pool during a rainstorm: “Every child has the right to be a child. Dirt is good.”

Persil 'Dirt is Good' campaign - children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates

Even the UNICEF commended Unilever for “creating awareness of children’s right to play, the right to express themselves—in short, the right to be a child! It encourages parents to see the value of exploration, play, activity and exercise as critical to children’s development and important for full and healthy lives, even if it means that children get dirty in the process.”

Idea for Impact: Enhance how your customers see and feel the benefits of your products and services. Promote an emotional connection between products and customers.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Make ‘Em Thirsty; or, Master of the Art of the Pitch
  2. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points
  3. The Loss Aversion Mental Model: A Case Study on Why People Think Spirit is a Horrible Airline
  4. Leo Burnett on Meaning and Purpose
  5. A Sense of Urgency

Filed Under: Business Stories, Effective Communication Tagged With: Creativity, Emotions, Likeability, Marketing, Parables, Persuasion, Skills for Success, Winning on the Job

How You See is What You See

August 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How You See is What You See

So very often, we don’t give ourselves to allow for new understandings, new perspectives, and new interpretations to emerge.

Three people were visiting and viewing the Grand Canyon—an artist, a pastor and a cowboy. As they stood on the edge of that massive abyss, each one responded with a cry of exclamation. The artist said, “Ah, what a beautiful scene to paint!” The minister cried, “What a wonderful example of the handiwork of God!” The cowboy mused, “What a terrible place to lose a cow!”

Idea for Impact: Work to overcome the strong waves of conditioning that you’ve been exposed to your whole life.

Take a step back and consider how you’re responding to a situation emotionally and intellectually.

Free up your mind from the conditioning that may be restraining it.

Don’t let your narrow perspectives—those comfortable walls within which you confine yourself—to make you lose touch with what’s possible.

Explore. Discover. Discern. Open your mind to new frontiers.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Overcoming Personal Constraints is a Key to Success
  2. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  3. What the Duck!
  4. How to Solve a Problem By Standing It on Its Head
  5. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas

Filed Under: Mental Models, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Parables, Problem Solving, Resilience, Success, Thinking Tools, Thought Process

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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