What Creativity Tools do not do

In 2005, the Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) at the University of Bath carried out a literature review and summary of creativity and innovation in the english-speaking world. They aimed to find a model which would be useful for engineers.

This research summarizes how people thought while they were making, creating or producing:

• About 50,000 products in different countries and 10 different areas of industry, education, religion and science.
• 110 thinking tools, which help creativity and innovation
• Processes for Organizational Change, Design and Manufacture

The research also shows up two extremes of thinking.

At one end of the scale, there are many thinking tools, which are useful for brainstorming kind of events or scenario-definition. Tools like the '6 Thinking Hats', 'Lateral Thinking' or the 'Random Word' technique of Edward De Bono, as well as Tony Buzan's 'Mind-Mapping' are perhaps the best-known. These tools fit into what is called 'divergent thinking' models.

Unfortunately, these tools also:

• lack the kind of rigour required to analyse and synthese complex, potentially contradictory data
• are of limited use to people who need high-level, technical results.

At the other end of the scale, there are thinking tools, which are rational and rigorous enough for technical demands. Methods such as Taguchi, FMEA and QFD streamline the quality of output and management of a process, and TRIZ allows users to borrow pre-existing solutions to their problem from patents. With the exception of TRIZ, these tools fit into 'convergent thinking' models.

Unfortunately also, these tools:

• either cannot provoke ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking
• or cannot provide a simple map that captures and relates all potential problems with their solutions.

In other words, there was no tool on the market that covered both kinds of creative thinking - divergent and convergent. On top of that, rational process management is not enough to produce breathrough innovation on its own. And random idea generation won't work alone either -not even stealing answers from others is enough to make a product that will change the world!

The plain fact is, we need both: to find the right question to solve and to let the right answers appear ! 

The fact is, all historically significant inventions were made by people who found important questions to answer before other people even knew a question existed. Of course they then solved this problem. 

So how do they know where to find a breakthrough question? Well, no one had researched this question in Western science. But Anja (the founder of PRIZM) figured that some kind of 'pattern matching' goes on in the creator's mind, between the old problem and the new solution, whether people know it or not. And in the absence of any other theory on how this works, she drew on 'spiritual technologies' as well as checking the tens of thousands of products mentioned in the IMRC report, to make a map of the whole process of creation.

The synthesis of this research is the PRIZM Game, Method, and Innovation Map. Anja's Innovation Map is the first that matches the question-asking (or 'problem-finding') with the answer-finding.

PRIZM is in fact the first thinking tool that guarantees to:

• show you how to ask the right questions and find the right problems.
• allow you to borrow ideas from others and systematically transfer relevant solutions from these areas to your own. 
• promote an experience of surprise and fun, while inspiration is not left to chance.

If you want to check out what went into PRIZM, you could look at these four subjects in particular:

• TRIZ - which has information from hundreds of thousands of engineering patents
• Biology - which has undergone millions of years of research to evolve the best patterns of form and behaviour
• Buddhist meditation - which has been established in 2500 years of research on creative space and mind and is therefore what Anja calls a 'spiritual technology'
• 'Flow' - a concept which comes from modern research on motivation, joy and skill.

More information on these topics in other sections of this website. The source of text on this page can also be found in our 'Further Reading' section (Pahl, Newnes & McMahon).