A brief introduction to creativity and futures thinking tools to jumpstart innovation.

1. Futures Tools
prepared for for
creativity
Forrester Leadership Boards and
Enterprise Architecture Council innovation:
thinking
Innovating by Raising Awareness differently
( a small
29 April 2010 sample ).
Dr. Wendy L. Schultz

2. Can foresight inspire
creativity?
• What is creativity?
• What is innovation?
• How can foresight inspire creativity?
• What emerging changes are driving design?
• What will the next generation’s consumers want?

3. Types of Creativity
• Thinking up new ideas
• Making something tangible
• Producing an event
• Organising people or projects
• Doing something spontaneous
• Building relationships
• Changing your “inner self”

4. Creativity: Key Concepts
 Koestler, ‘bisociation’;
 Johansson, ‘intersection’;
 Kim & Mauborgne, ‘value
innovation’ leading to ‘blue
ocean strategy’.

5. Example:
”bisociation” …
=
juicer
+ spider Philippe Starck?

6. Constraints on Creativity
• Limiting beliefs
• Fear (of the known and unknown)
• Other emotions (eg, anger, guilt, boredom)
• Stress
• Overspecialization
• Narrow thinking
• Lack of imagination

7. Futures / Creativity Tools
• Reverse Assumptions: because current operating
conditions won’t last.
• Idea Boxes: scramble characteristics to innovate
• Futures Wheels: explore impact cascades because
change changes more than one thing
• De Bono’s “po”: beyond software mashups to
conceptual mashups
• Scenario Incasting: explore the business environments
and consumers of alternative possible futures and
innovate to create strategic responses

8. Value Innovation
• Which idea(s) offer greatest
potential to drive costs down?
• Which idea(s) offer buyer value
the industry has never before
presented consumers?

9. Blue Ocean Idea Index
• Will there be exceptional utility? Compelling
reasons to buy?
• Will the price be easily accessible to the mass
of buyers?
• Will your cost structure be advantageous?
• Will it address adoption hurdles?

10. Futures / Creativity Tools
• Reverse Assumptions: because current operating
conditions won’t last.
• Idea Boxes: scramble characteristics to innovate
• Futures Wheels: explore impact cascades because
change changes more than one thing
• De Bono’s “po”: beyond software mashups to
conceptual mashups
• Scenario Incasting: explore the business environments
and consumers of alternative possible futures and
innovate to create strategic responses

11. Reverse Assumptions: 45 min.
• Review your company and its products.
• What do its current products assume?
• State those assumptions as their polar opposites;
• What ‘could never happen?’
• Go to trends wall -- which trends support your
assumption reversals?
Current assumptions: raw What beliefs, values, conditions, Current customers, markets,
materials, customers’ needs, etc. etc. created these assumptions? products, services
What “3rd Horizon” innovations,
value shifts or other changes New customers, markets,
Reverse those assumptions: ??????
support the reversed products, services
assumptions?

12. Reverse Assumptions: eg.
What created / might create
Customers, Markets,
Time Assumptions these assumptions? Beliefs,
Products, Services
Values, Conditions, Trends
KOHLER: baths and
•People want to be clean; kitchens….
•Washing requires soap and PURE •Religious beliefs;
Past & WATER; •Hygienic science;
•PURE WATER is abundant; •Social mores / customs;
Current
•Water is supplied through pipes from •Historically abundant supply.
city mains.
REVERSED: •New materials (eg nanotech,
•People don’t want to be clean; bioengineered cloth) ‘self-clean’;
Possible What new products or
•Neither soap nor pure water is needed •Water IS scarce;
services might Kohler want to
to wash; •Condensor technologies;
Future offer?
•PURE WATER is scarce! assembled from H and O;
•Water ‘from thin air’? desalination.

13. Idea Boxes: 45 min.
• Think about your product.
• List its attributes: shape, material, texture, energy
source, duration, location, etc.
• List at least five alternative possible choices for
each attribute, drawn from “2nd Horizon” or “3rd
Horizon” changes.
• Create a new product by choosing a different
combination of choices, e.g.,…

14. Idea Boxes: 45 min.
e.g., Ball-point Pens
INK
SHAPE MATERIAL CAP
RESERVOIR
Faceted Metal Attached cap No cartridge
Square Glass No cap Permanent
Beaded Wood Retracts Paper cartridge
Cartridge made of
Sculptured Paper Cleaning cap
ink

15. Futures Wheels

16. Futures Wheels: Origins
• Jerome Glenn
• Invented futures wheels in 1971 as a method for policy analysis and
forecasting
• Also called Implementation Wheel, Impact Wheel, Mind Mapping, and
Webbing
• His definitive article available in the methods CD from the AC/UNU
Millennium Project, along with the annual State of the Future report
[go here for the methods compendium: http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/FRM-V3.html].
• Joel Barker
• “Cascade thinking:” go out at least three orders of implications to
find big surprises
• http://www.strategicexploration.com/i-wheel/index.htm

17. Futures Wheels: 45 45 min.
Futures Wheels: min.
 Enter your chosen change in the inner circle of your
worksheet.
 Everyone take five minutes by themselves to imagine
possible impacts of this change over the next twenty years:
go to extremes -- have fun.
 Map immediate impacts as primary on the appropriate
‘spoke’; as primary impacts emerge, add impact spokes to
those as well. Take 10 minutes.
 Each group take 10 minutes to identify 5 new markets, or
clients and customers implied by the new conditions.
 Each group take 10 minutes to identify 5 new products.

18. office sound silent, eye-tracking menu
“earbud” headphones to barriers navigation goggles
talk to/hear computer
developed
work noisier
work?
travel? economy?
primary effects
home/ voice input / output,
biometric passwords education?
families?
impact communications? hobbies?
environment?
impact
secondary impact
effects
Futures Wheel

19. voice input / output,
work noisier biometric passwords
market for “great New licensing opp’ty for
no passwords required
voices” popular singers and
drop in carpal tunnel
actors
syndrome
Increase in pirate market: great
worker voices
productivity collapse of
“napsterized”
keyboard wrist
decline in worker rest market Rather talk to your
compensation costs machine than you…
Futures Wheel

20. work?
travel? economy?
primary effects
home/
change education?
families?
communications? hobbies?
environment?
secondary effects
Futures Wheel

21. ”po” … from Edward de Bono
• ”po” asks you to surprise yourself!
• think outside of categories
• question assumptions
• forced association of unlikely pairs
(“bisociation” or “intersection”):
• randomly chosen word & object of interest;
• list defining characteristics of random (noun);
• describe what your product would be like if it
had / could have those attributes.
• what emerging trends or changes would help you
create those innovations?

22. Kangaroo po...
...auto

23. Cat po...
...bathtub

24. Octopus po...
...anorak jacket

25. Scenario ‘Incasting’…
exploring alternative futures (‘instant’ scenario thinking)
• You wake up to find yourself in a future 25 years
hence…
• Do NOT question how this future came to be;
instead, ask how your company will adapt and
thrive in these conditions:
• Which of your products / services will be obsolete?
• What new potential customer base has emerged?
• What new products or services would allow you to
thrive?

26. High Tech Decentralization...
• Human inventiveness triumphs! Clean, abundant energy and advances
in robotics, nanotechnology, and material science give people very
precise, low-waste control of our resources and environments.
• Genetic engineering gives us precise control over our bodies -- and our
definitions of who and what we are.
• High-definition, multi-sense holography and virtual reality let us create
virtual worlds of our inner visions -- leading to new art forms AND a
new form of autism.
• Data and telecoms networks freed information globally, and local and
regional direct democracies are the most common form of governance.
• Respect for the environment is just part of rational resource
management.

27. Environmental Sustainability...
• Undeniable environmental changes in the early ‘10’s shifted values away
from materialism, towards personal responsibility for the environment and
the welfare of future generations; some communities punish the misuse of
resources.
• “Eco-preneurs” developed ecologically friendly technologies and extremely
sophisticated resource use and recycling systems -- with crossover
innovations among genetic engineering, the biosciences, and materials
science, plastic now grows on trees [shrubs, actually].
• Lifestyles downsize: from nations to bioregions; from cities to towns; from 3
SUV’s per family to one shared among three families.
• Environmental restoration and bio-recreation of extinct species.
• Less materialism; more emphasis on learning and the arts.

28. Discipline and Duty...
• Conservative neo-fundamentalists have garnered power,
emphasizing family and community over individualism; non-
nationals and “socially unacceptable” groups are expelled or
repressed.
• People focus on traditional mores and modes of life, with social
roles as well as behaviors and beliefs more constrained; the
explosive growth of the Internet and the Web slowed
dramatically as society’s censors scrutinized content for
suitability -- art and other expressive media are cramped as well.
• While few environmental-management restrictions are placed on
business, the economy slows because of the restrictions on
creativity.

29. The Future, Inc.
• The extreme outgrowth of global mass media / consumption trends:
new consumer products move from inventor to production to
distribution to global market saturation in a year!
• The government gave up and privatized many services to cut national
spending and reduce the deficit.
• The Fortune 500 offer so many amenities in their benefit packages that
corporate citizenship is more important than country of origin -- the
world’s important boundaries and cultures are now those of the major
corporations more than of countries.
• The rich and the poor now have better access to goods, but the true elite
are those who command corporations’ executive privileges.
• Environmental preservation occurs only where it profits.

30. World Crash
• The global recession proliferated in consumer, corporate, national, and
international debt, resulting in the global economic disintegration of ‘13.
• Terrorism, regional wars and border skirmishes, and environmental crises
exacerbated the disintegration of the interconnected, globalized economy.
• Production and, more importantly, distribution of needed raw materials,
goods and services collapsed in many areas.
• Fear of looting and piracy generated armed isolationism in many
countries, and in many communities within countries.
• By 2023, political units fragment, creating new city-states, urban tribal
systems, and roving bands of refugees on land and sea.

31. Let Foresight inspire change:
• Establish corporate foresight dialogue:
• Open scanning database
• Invite participation from scientists, inventors,
artists, educators, public
• Explore alternative outcomes (scenarios)
• Let the turbulent overlap of multiple perspectives
spark creativity and innovation…

32. Complex Adaptive Systems:
complexity responds to chaos
• Social networking, open source, prosumption,
and flashmobs all owe their genesis to the
complexity paradigm, which assumes that
complex adaptive systems...
– tend to be self-stabilising;
– are or appear to be purposeful;
– can use feedback to modify their
behaviour;
– can modify their own environments; and
– can replicate, maintain, repair, and
reorganise themselves.
• Chaos is turbulence:
- where emerging changes intersect and
overlap, they generate a turbulent space;
- complex systems adapt to turbulence via
creativity and innovation.

33. 4 Thinking Modes:
Logical
Creative
Systemic
Intuitive
Foresight pumps innovation.

34. The future will be framed by how we answer
five fundamental questions:
DEFINE: What new concepts, ideas, and
paradigms will emerge to help us make sense
of the world?
RELATE: How will we live together on planet
Earth?
CONNECT: What arts and technologies will
we use to connect people, places, and things?
CREATE: As human beings what will we be
inspired to create?
CONSUME: How will we use the earth’s
resources?
Innovation creates futures.

35. Thank you!
Please feel free to contact me
with any questions.
Dr. Wendy L. Schultz
Infinite Futures:
Foresight research and training
Oxford, England
http://www.infinitefutures.com
wendy@infinitefutures.com