Creative ideas form the basis of innovation. These ideas are the seeds that enable innovation and improvement to grow. Being innovative in business requires encouraging participation and maximizing everyone’s creative potential. Creating a pool of ideas is the most important element of a successful innovation process. However, since generating ideas is a creative process, it can be difficult to approach a problem from a new perspective and to offer new ideas that will produce solutions. For this reason, in our blog post, we will contribute to your idea-generation process by addressing 5 important techniques to strengthen creativity in business life. How to Strengthen Creativity at Work? Creativity must be nurtured in an organization at all levels, encouraging employees to challenge assumptions, ask different questions, and look at things from different perspectives. Here are 5 techniques to strengthen creativity: 1.Scamper Technique The Scamper Technique is an approach that envisages asking various questions in order to think about different aspects of products, services or business processes and to take them to the next idea. You can think of the scamper technique, which has seven jumping points, as a springboard to idea generation. Let’s take a look at the questions you should ask when using this technique, in other words, the jumping points: Substitution: Can something else be used as a substitute for a product? Combine: What happens when a product is combined with another product? Adapt: Is it possible to adapt an existing product for another use? Change: Does changing an existing product change or improve the whole? Eliminate: Is it possible to get rid of a particular product and make it simpler or more efficient? Evaluate for Another Use: Who else can use this product or service? Can we use the waste from this product to create a new product? Rearrange or Invert: What would happen if we reversed the current process? In what direction and how would the customer experience change if we change the order of steps of an existing process? 2. 5 Whys Method It is a problem-solving tool to analyze the causes of problems. This method was developed by Toyota Industries founder Sakichi Toyoda in the early 1930s. It is a technique for investigating the underlying cause-effect relationships of a given situation, isolating the root causes, and then focusing on improvement activities to solve problems using Kaizen. Using this technique, you can ask questions until you identify the root cause of a problem. What is the problem? In this technique, the problem must first be defined. Therefore, the first thing to ask is what the problem is. Why is there a problem? After answering the first question clearly, it is necessary to ask why the question exists. Why do we care? It should be ensured that employees understand why they should care about this problem, what they will get and what they will encounter after successfully solving the problem. Why will this be beneficial? Managers and employees should identify the benefits and information the solution will bring. Why do we do it? Such vague questions should often be asked by business managers or employees who want to understand whether a particular action makes sense and is necessary under certain circumstances. Five reasons is a very useful tool that can help your team significantly improve their problem-solving abilities. 3. Forced Relationship Method The forced relationship method is one of the effective methods used to generate ideas for new products and services. It can be applied in this way in an individual or group setting. In the forced relationships method, you choose a keyword related to the product or service, and then select a few more words that are completely unrelated to the keyword. Next is to make connections between those words and generate new ideas in the process. Since it is a work of generating ideas through unrelated words, it is called the forced relations method. 4. The Wishing Method The wishing method is applied by wishing for solutions to an existing problem. According to the method, if you have a wish list, your employees will start arguing about how to solve them and how to bring them to life. 5. Word Bank One of the effective ways to get new ideas and solutions is to create a word bank. A word bank is simply the retrieval of words, terms or phrases related to the problem at hand. Words can help you build bridges between different aspects of your problem and find new solutions. The Importance of Employee Suggestion Systems After trying the above-mentioned techniques to generate ideas in business life, you will see that your employees produce much more creative and quality ideas. But how can you keep track of all these ideas and properly evaluate each idea? At this point, Employee Suggestion Systems come into play, helping your company collect, evaluate and manage ideas. In this way, you prevent the disappearance of creative ideas.
