Recipe for Innovation

I attended the NMK Beers and Innovation event last night. There was some quite lively debate, a few interesting bits and pieces and an opportunity for some thought. The headline was “Do agencies innovate” but most of the discussion was around what makes it hard to innovate. There were various thoughts; here are mine.

Ingredients:

1. Knowledge – in order to innovate one needs information and intelligence (more crystal ball than the IQ). How do things work? How do people behave? What are their unspoken needs? Where are things going?
2. Confidence – not arrogance. Confidence to challenge and question the brief, the problem area and the confidence to be questioned. And the ‘guts’ variety that helps battle for something that you are confident of.

You will need:

1. Brainstorming. I was lucky enough to be taught brainstorming techniques on my engineering course. Creating an atmosphere where no idea is a bad idea can be hard but is worth it. Some of the silliest ideas lead to the best solutions.
2. Collaboration. Bringing multiple disciplines together is vital to push innovation forward. The more diverse the knowledge (see ingredients section) the better.
3. The ability to inspire. The ability to inspire your client. The ability to inspire your agency.

Mix the ingredients liberally with the help of your multi-disciplinary team. Make sure that the atmosphere in your workshops is good as negativity can prevent the ideas from rising.

I find this works though the ingredients aren’t always freely available and some skill is required to operate the tools.

Footnote:

It is arguable (if supper with The Voice is anything to go by) that Agencies will always struggle with innovation:

• How do you get paid for an idea and how much is it worth?
• Who owns the idea?
• Is the BBC’s idea of paying for ideas actually workable outside their ‘business’ environment?

And you might also need participants who aren’t too worried about making their mortgage payments – this applies equally to clients and agencies!