John Cleese gave a fabulous presentation last week at the Creativity World Forum 2008. After setting everyone’s mind on the importance of creativity, he introduced his technique of putting creative thinking into practice in daily business life.  I really liked it being so straightforward and practical.

Focus on only two key elements:

1. Creating boundaries in time (set a clear begin and end time)
2. Creating boundaries in space (define a clear setting and location)

By creating clear boundaries in time and space, even if very little every two weeks for example, you can create exactly that environment in which your creative, right brain can come out and play. John called it an “Oasis Of Creativity”. Just imagine: When you start your scheduled 30 minutes of creativity, what would be your first thought?  Probably it will be something like “I should have called John” or “I forgot to send that document”. Do not act on this anymore than jotting these points down so you can forget about them for the coming 30 minutes. Relax and let your creative mind come out and wander, don’t steer it. Let the ideas flow, do not judge, take some notes, and outside your oasis of creativity you can then use your logical brain to evaluate and expand the ideas. If you do not see the value of this, just think of the following: doing the same will almost never get you further. Keeping on tackling problems logically will most likely give you the same results over and over again. Create your small oasis of creativity with clear boundaries and just experience for yourself over a couple of weeks if it proves valuable for you.

Amongst thousands of creativity tips, I believe his idea is quite powerful to introduce some creative thinking in daily business life. I invite everyone to read this great transcript of John’s keynote. A final quote to reflect on… “Intelligence increases when you think less!”

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Guest post by Roland Harwood of NESTA.

Open innovation appears very attractive yet can be challenging to implement, especially for organisations that are traditionally used to sourcing new innovations from within. Yet it is an increasingly important business strategy due to the increased connectivity and movement of people, ideas and money.

Successful open innovation requires both careful consideration of various technical and cultural factors and is, therefore, I believe it is both a science and an art. Therefore, in this article I wanted to share some of the lessons we, at NESTA, have learned over the past few years, having worked now on open innovation projects with hundreds of organisations including numerous Multinational Corporations, (including Procter & Gamble, Oracle, Virgin Atlantic, McLaren, and Cancer Research UK), Universities, Start-ups and Social ventures.

All of our projects with corporations are based on the simple hypothesis that they would benefit from opening up and diversifying their approach to innovation as it provides access to new ideas, solutions and markets. To test this hypothesis in each of our projects, we have developed a different business model to encourage corporates to collaborate with various partners including with their customers, innovative small companies, and other corporates.

We have found that open innovation happens in three distinct phases, broadly in sequence but with iteration and overlap between each:

1. Explore - the fun bit - working together to find a common purpose and opportunities for collaboration across organisations and sectors.
2. Nurture - the risky bit - vulnerable phase when ideas aren’t fully formed enough for clear decisions to be made. It requires confidence and persistence to develop further.
3. Exploit - the hard but important bit - when ideas are turned into tangible economic or social benefits.

On top of this, we think there are three major cross-cutting themes which need to be considered and managed at each stage of the open innovation process.

1. Difference – Incorporating new perspectives leads to creative collaborations but also have the potential for tensions to emerge. Roles and responsibilities need to be agreed in by the time you reach the Exploit phase.
2. Relationships - Trust between participants needs to be earned and developed so that a shared language and respect emerges. Crucially, risk and reward must be shared as equally as possible, over the course of the collaboration.
3. Interactions - Light facilitation is required early on, with ongoing participation arising through self selection (through the law of two feet i.e. move/leave if you want). Clear management and leadership kicks in later, once the opportunities are defined.

We’ve tried to capture these three phases and themes in a framework for successful open innovation in the grid diagram below:

Figure: The Open Innovation Grid – the three phases and themes of successful collaboration

We have used and developed various tools and techniques for successful open innovation at each stage. For example, we have used unconference formats and hothousing events at the Explore phase to allow ideas to emerge and coalesce. Later, in the fragile Nurture phase, it really helps to have a trusted agent (or intermediary), particularly if the process is new to either partner. They help to manage the interactions and protect the interests of both/all sides and drive the collaboration towards the creation of a visual business case or prototype. Finally, at the Exploit phase, the agreements regarding shared risk and reward are required through written agreements or contracts.

We have lots more information, tools and learning that we’d be happy to share about our experience to date, but in this article I just wanted to share the framework we are building through our open innovation experience, and to see how it relates to the experience of others. I hope it is of use to others and would welcome feedback and discussion.

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NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Its mission is to transform the UK’s capacity for innovation. NESTA Connect is a campaign for more open and collaboration innovation underpinned by the core belief that 1+1=3. For more details, please take a look at the blog.

On November 19-20 all innovators gather again for the Creativity World Forum 2008.  This year’s edition takes place in Antwerp (Belgium), in the Lotto Arena. As always the line-up of speakers and activities is impressive and makes a visit very worthwhile.

The speaker line-up includes:

• Steve Wozniak - Co-founder Apple
  
• Tom Kelley - GM of IDEO and author of ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation’
  
• Dan Heath - Author ‘Made to Stick’
• Chris Anderson, John Cleese, Martin Heylen…

For only 395€ the Creativity World Forum 2008 is an excellent opportunity to be inspired by powerful keynotes and creative co-visitors, and of course, to enjoy the delight of our Belgian food!