Creative Difference: a Case Study

Case Study:

John Colรณn / DMGT 702 / Fall 2017

Content Innovation

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IDEO

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Creative Difference

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Antecedent

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Systems Approach

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Closure

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Drivers

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Triggers

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Attributes

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Adopters

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Conclusion

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Sources

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The Creative Difference Dashboard (IDEO)

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“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, President and CEO of IDEO The Creative Difference team at work in IDEO’s San Francisco office.

(IDEO)

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Design Thinking: A methodology used to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions. It involves a solution-focused mindset and action oriented towards creating a preferred future. Design thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be—and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user.

Innovation: Solutions to problems involving the human perspective, stemmed from a process led by people in all steps. The human-centered approach involves an understanding of customers’ or users’ unmet or unarticulated needs. Design thinking minimizes the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers or users through prototypes to learn, test, and refine concepts.

Source: Creativity at Work

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What is Creative Difference?

A guide for business leaders to understand their company’s specific strengths and blindspots when it comes to adapting to a rapidly changing market.

Created by IDEO, a global design firm founded in Silicon Valley that has spent 35 years working with some of the world’s biggest companies on creativity and innovation.

It begins with a questionnaire, that assesses three things: How does the organization score on the six qualities of a creative company?

How do the employees view the company’s culture?

What type of creative company is the organization?

The findings are analyzed by IDEO and delivered in an interactive dashboard.

It not only tells companies how they stack up to other similar ones, but it tells them how to prioritize their efforts to see the biggest impact. It also gives them an action plan that outlines the specific steps they should take to make their company more innovative, right down to what to do for different teams within the company.

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Why Creative Difference?

I noticed my manager struggling to figure out where to focus in order to take our practices to the next level. He wanted to be more customercentered and challenge the status quo yet didn’t have tactical steps.

I naturally turned to IDEO for its design thinking and ever-evolving methods of responding to new, complex challenges. I sought a solution designed with people in mind first for the easiest diffusion process.

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IDEO’s “Creative Difference” survey assesses an organization’s innovativeness, helping teams find tangible ways they can improve. (IDEO)

The Process

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6 Qualities Essential to Innovation

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Company’s Culture An organizational culture can be telling in determining where to focus efforts.

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Types of Companies

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Antecedent of Creative Difference: Traditional Employee Engagement Surveys

Over half of the companies that have used Creative Difference also do engagement surveys. Many companies see them as complementary.

Creative Difference addresses engagement as a secondary but highly correlated factor. Using Creative Difference to adapt the culture, structure, and processes of the organization creates a much more creative, productive, and engaging workplace. It takes the stance that engagement should be intrinsically connected to the context in which people do creative work. By combining the cultural insights and metrics from Creative Difference with the engagement metrics from pulse surveys, organizations can have a clear and constant level of awareness of their operations without the heavy lift of a traditional employee engagement survey.

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Develop Vision & Strategy Develop & Manage Products and Services Market & Sell Products and Services Deliver Products & Services Manage Customer Services

Develop & Manage Human Capital Manage Information Technology Manage Financial Resources Acquire, Construct & Manage Assets Manage Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Resiliency Managing External Relationships Develop & Manage Business Capabilities

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Systems Approach

Creative Difference’s recommendations can be applied to make existing projects more effective and don’t require much setup to start practicing and realizing results. It is intended as a tool to inform and guide practical actions that can be applied to change initiatives, as well as making progress towards systematic organizational change. The Focus Areas identify where improvements will most increase the organization’s ability to innovate and adapt. They help companies go from assessment to action by breaking down top strengths and weaknesses into bite-sized, digestible statements.

Example of Creative Qualities scores and a break down of customized focus areas.

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Closure

Creative Difference is designed to be helpful to leadership teams as a standalone tool. Whether or not leaders choose to work with IDEO consulting, Creative Difference is a great way to begin, guide, or track a journey towards a more adaptable organization, or monitor and maintain an already excellent organization. It offers a baseline for improvement that can be compared to a variety of other organizations. Once a baseline has been established, they’ll be able to check back down the road to see how well they’ve been able to change the way teams work to achieve better results.

Creative Difference helps develop a common language for creativity and change, where employees across the organization can actively participate in the growth and improvement of the organization. For those who want some extra advice from seasoned organization designers and other relevant experts at IDEO, a free follow-up call to discuss results is offered.

Along with each focus area are sets of possible action items to spark action. The dashboard allows users to vote for action items they like or even add their own.

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Drivers of Creative Difference

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Triggers of Creative Difference

Sometimes the word ‘creativity’ can throw business leaders off. They think of art, poetry, and music, or at best traditional ‘creative’ business functions like graphic design or advertising. Sometimes it’s good to level set and establish a common language within the organization of what creativity is, or what alternative word the organization will use. Some common terms are innovation, adaptability, change, business design, and design thinking. Very few would argue against the fact that people within an organization should be able to effectively drive change, whether that is to modernize operations, evolve offerings, or innovate to create new products. All of these are by nature ‘creative’, even though many business people are uncomfortable with that framing.

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Diffusion: Attributes of Innovation

Creative Difference not only assesses organizations, but also opens a dialogue. Most employees only feel comfortable raising one or two critical issues a year, if that, and even those aren’t always the ones that matter most. Most companies don’t know about the processes they could be using – Creative Difference helps uncover these leadership blind-spots and opens dialogue about how to improve upon them.

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Diffusion: Adopters Creative Difference is a team/business-unit assessment.

Understanding the culture and capabilities unit by unit provides more granular and useful data about the organization than looking at company-wide data alone. It identifies the bright spots in the organization so it can credit good practices and spread them to other teams.

Creative Difference can be applied to a single unit, all units across an organization, or any in-between combination.

Market-facing units

Internal-facing units 20

Regional units

(IDEO)

Market-facing units: Business units, product teams, brand teams, startups, ventures, and project teams across corporations, startups, government departments, and non-profits.

Internal-facing units: Functional team (e.g. marketing, or supply chain) can use Creative Difference if they are looking to innovate or adapt its systems or offerings and aspire to do more than managing day to day operations. These teams also frequently participate as part of bigger market-facing units as essential partners in developing holistic solutions that work from a technical, business, and customer perspective.

Regional units: In many cases it is applied to a regional team if that team is relatively autonomous and empowered to drive change in a region.

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Conclusion In essence, Creative Difference is IDEO’s attempt to quantify innovation. It’s been a year since the launch of the survey product and more than 100 companies have used Creative Difference to internally assess their teams’ aptitude for innovation.

Now, IDEO has definitive data to back up its hypotheses about what behavior actually drives that elusive quality. Creative Difference can be characterized as being the best tool to design a productive and engaging work environment with a focus on making a creatively competitive organization. For situations where organizations are interested in also assessing traditional engagement aspects like compensation and career progression, utilizing a short, lighter-weight pulse survey is recommended.

The Peruvian holding company Intercorp has used Creative Difference across its 30 organizations, which each come together for an annual workshop. (IDEO)

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Sources About IDEO. IDEO, www.ideo.com/about.

Creative Difference. IDEO, creativedifference.ideo.com.

“Design Thinking as a Strategy for Innovation.” Creativity at Work, www.creativityatwork.com/design-thinking-strategy-for-innovation/.

“Q+A With IDEO: Six Critical Innovation Qualities.” Innovation, Steelcase, www.steelcase.com/research/articles/topics/innovation/qa-with-ideo-six critical-innovation-qualities/.

Schwab, Katharine. “Ideo Studied Innovation In 100+ Companies–Here’s What It

Found.” Co.Design, 20 Mar. 2017, www.fastcodesign.com/3069069/ideo studied-innovation-in-100-companies-heres-what-it-found.

“The Value of Design.” Design Management Institute, DMI,

www.dmi.org/?DesignValue.

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