Creativity & Innovation - Week 11

Creativity + InnovationKevin Popović, B.A., M.S.

© Kevin Popović, SDSU Creativity + Innovation

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Session 1.11

• Welcome• Roll, Admin• Game • Reading


• Review Projects• Guest Speaker• Assignment


The Business of Medical MarijuanaPatrick M. Rost, Founder & CEO, Capital Investors


Make A Better: ReadingA Game of Collaboration and Innovation

Harvard Business Review


Innovation: The Classic Traps


• Innovation goes in or out of fashion as a strategic driver of corporate growth, but with every wave of enthusiasm, executives make the same mistakes.

• Most of the time, they stumble in their R&D efforts because they are engaged in a difficult balancing act



• They need to protect existing revenue streams while coaxing along new ones.

• But “corporate entrepreneurship” doesn’t have to be an oxymoron.

• Innovation can flourish if executives heed business lessons from the past.


Strategy Lessons

• Not every innovation idea has to be a blockbuster. Sufficient numbers of small or incremental innovations can lead to big profits.

• Don’t just focus on new product development: Transformative ideas can come from any function—for instance, marketing, production, finance, or distribution.


Strategy Lessons

• Successful innovators use an “innovation pyramid,” with several big bets at the top that get most of the investment; a portfolio of promising midrange ideas in test stage; and a broad base of early stage ideas or incremental innovations. Ideas and influence can flow up or down the pyramid.


Process Lessons

• Tight controls strangle innovation. The planning, budgeting, and reviews applied to existing businesses will squeeze the life out of an innovation effort.


Process Lessons

• Companies should expect deviations from plan: If employees are rewarded simply for doing what they committed to do, rather than acting as circumstances would suggest, their employers will stifle and drive out innovation.


Structure Lessons

• While loosening formal controls, companies should tighten interpersonal connections between innovation efforts and the rest of the business.

• Game-changing innovations often cut across established channels or combine elements of existing capacity in new ways.


Structure Lessons

• If companies create two classes of corporate citizens—supplying the innovators with more perks, privileges, and prestige—those in the existing business will make every effort to crush the innovation.


Skills Lessons

• Even the most technical of innovations requires strong leaders with great relationship and communication skills.

• Members of successful innovation teams stick together through the development of an idea, even if the company’s approach to career timing requires faster job rotation.


Skills Lessons

• Because innovations need connectors—people who know how to find partners in the mainstream business or outside world—they flourish in cultures that encourage collaboration.


Individual Project + MemoCreativity & Innovation


Individual Project + Memo

• Develop a creative product or service• Be novel, useful, have market potential• Write 1-page memo mapping ideas to what you have

learned in class that will insure effectiveness of your idea• Select a creativity exercise or technique, apply to your

idea, document.• Apply what you have learned (50%)• 1:00 presentation of concept, explain thinking, sell your

idea (50%).


Design Thinking Group ProjectCreativity & Innovation


Design Thinking Group Project

• Groups of 5• Apply a design thinking approach to develop a new

product or service• 3:00 Creative presentation• Include project overview (memo)• Grades = group presentation (50%, memo (30%),

individual evaluation (20%)• Survivor rules apply


Leadership & Management

Creativity & Innovation - Week 11