As our economy struggles, we hear people cry out that we need to be more creative, to come up with new ideas for our businesses, to find new markets. This is all true; however, many of our experiences from past downturns in the economy have nothing to do with today’s problems, so creativity is essential. But creativity by itself doesn’t get you anywhere. However, creativity and innovation go hand in hand.

Creativity is often seeing the same thing but in a different context. Innovation occurs when the creative idea is taken into the market. Leonardo da Vinci was a creative genius who never built anything.

Déjà vu is the feeling that you have experienced something before. The late comedian George Carlin called the opposite of this “vuja de,” looking at something familiar, but in a different way.

Building on George Carlin’s comedy routine, Bill Taylor, a leader in business innovation and one of the founders of Fast Company magazine, said, “Let’s face it: Most companies in most industries have a kind of tunnel vision. They chase the same opportunities that everyone else is chasing; they miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing. It’s the companies that see a different game that win big. The most important question for innovators today is: What do you see that the competition doesn’t see? Answering that question requires ‘vuja de.’”

In his book Hope is Not a Method, Gordon Sullivan describes three questions that strategic leaders regularly ask themselves:

• What’s happening?

• What’s not happening?

• What can I do to influence the action?

It is in this second question that opportunity exists. We need “vuja de” to look for opportunities that others are not seeing. Henry Ford was not the first person to make a car, nor was his the best. However, Ford asked himself “What is not happening?” and saw that an industry of automobiles made by craftsmen did not provide for a mass market. He created an automotive manufacturing process and paid automotive workers enough so they could afford to buy the cars they made and created the middle class.

In our workshop titled Unleashing the Power of Teams, we describe a “Z-Process” for innovation. In this process, each member of the team plays a specific role, often one that comes naturally to him or her, sometimes a role that the person has to work at to perform well.

In the Creation Phase, the team tries to conceptualize a new future. This phase is characterized by free and open discussion and building on the ideas of others in the team. Brainstorming and mind-mapping are the key activities in this phase.

In the Advancement Phase, the team groups ideas together that have a natural attraction or affinity to each other. Some ideas are discarded as the team debates the merit of each one; some are combined to form a stronger option. Some members of the team will see the business possibilities of the options and build the business case around the idea, take on the role of champion and move the idea forward. In this phase the team must answer the “so what” question. We did this, so what? What is the benefit to the company and our customers from doing this?

In the Refining Phase, the idea that has been advanced is now dissected and reexamined to identify any flaws or missed opportunities, then refined to make improvements. This can be an unsettling time for some team members as they see their original ideas taken apart, and unsettling for others as they see the problems but aren’t creative enough to see the solution. The team may have to return to the skills used in the Creation Phase to overcome these concerns.

In the Execution Phase, the team takes the refined option and now focuses on brainstorming ideas for implementation. Often teams have expended so much energy in the earlier phases that they do not give enough attention and detail to this phase. Failure to properly implement the final plan is a major cause for teams to fail.

In each of these phases, team members have to recognize their natural role within the team. In each phase the team member’s natural role may be emphasized or the person may have to adapt into another role to accommodate the phase that the team is in. The transition from one phase to the next, the “passing of the baton,” is critical to keep the team moving forward and not getting bogged down at any step in the process.

If you were to ask a group of people to make a list of the innovators in the world, the list would probably be made up of people such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Werner von Braun, George Washington Carver, Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie.

These people didn’t just dream up good ideas, they acted on them.

This is what innovation is about. It’s not just having fresh, new, creative ideas. It’s about being the FIRST to DO something about it, from conception to implementation. The “Z-Process” is a way to move from being simply creative to being innovative.

		Bob Wangen, president of Great Lakes Training & Consulting, and a certified   manager of quality/organizational excellence, is a local consultant who specializes in business improvement and leadership development.