Embracing Creativity in Product Development

In this blog, I summarize BPMA's August 2022 event, which was about Embracing Creativity in Product Development. This is an interesting and important topic for people who are new to product development., as this blog discusses what it means to be creative and provides some examples. .

This event’s guest speaker was Kristin McGillicuddy. She is the product marketer at KVH Industries Inc, a market leader in mobile connectivity. She also teaches at Stonehill College.

What is creativity?

Since this blog is about creativity, let’s define the word to better understand it. According to Britannica.com, creativity is “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.”  

Now that you know what creativity means, why should you care? You may wonder whether or not you are creative or if creativity is only for certain people. Are certain people born with those creative talents or did they learn to be creative throughout the years? Let’s find out.

Is creativity learned or innate?
While it is important to know what creativity is, it is also quite important to know what it is not. Kristin said creativity is not just for artists. Creativity can also be applied outside of the artistic world. Moreover, it is not innate to specific people.

Here are some characteristics of creative people. Creative people are experts in their fields, and have an interest in disorder, contradiction and imbalance. They are also curious problem seekers and solvers.

Interestingly, Kristin mentioned children are creative, but they lose their creativity in school due to conformity and social pressure.

Whether or not you think you are creative, the good news is that creativity is a process and can be learned.

What enables and disables creativity?

• Here’s what enables creativity
  • Motivation and an open mind, understanding of the concept, staying open until it’s time to refine
• On the other hand, here’s what disables creativity
  • That’s for them and not for me attitude, inconsistent and disorganized approach, operating in a creative silo

Should creativity have goals and outcomes?

Kristin mentioned that we definitely need to expect creativity to have goals and outcomes. Moreover, creativity needs to be implemented. Otherwise, it’s useless. Pablo Picasso and other artists whose names are synonymous to the word “creative” worked on their arts and crafts in forms of drawings and paintings to show their creativity. They have some form of output to show people. Otherwise, people won’t recognize their talents or creativity.

How can you quantify creativity and prove its value in the product development process?

There are many ways you can quantify your creativity. Here are a few examples.

• Use a scale system (Ex, On a scale of 1-5, how energetic are you today?) Get the average of the numbers.
• Competitive differentiation - measure how your product meets end-user needs
• Have a table of criteria and use a scale system
• Compare results with peers and cross functional teams
• Use metrics to measure ROI (Return On Investment), revenue, profit, market share, brand awareness, customer loyalty, industry accolades, social media

Creativity techniques you can use

• Assumption busting - assume that ALL assumptions can be challenged and overcome.
  • Ex. “RFID should never be used with a living organism”. Ask “How could this be NOT true?” While some topics may seem controversial, keep an open mind and look at all perspectives.
• Storytelling - explain who I am, why I’m here, vision, values in action, teaching, I know what you're thinking
• SCAMPER - Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify (Minify/Magnify), Put to another use, Eliminate or Elaborate, Reverse or Rearrange
  • Ex, Our customers complain that they can’t open our (cereal) boxed packaging neatly
    • Substitute with reusable tape
    • Modify the inner bag to double as an outer bag with zip closure
    • Eliminate the box
    • Modify glue to be 3 small dots
    • Modify closure to scored cardboard with tab
    • Rearrange the tab design
• Change of scenery - physical space, mental context (coloring book, puzzles, and virtual)
• I wish/how to
  • Change verbiage of a problem into solution
    • Example problem: “This stroller is too hard to open”. Change it to “I wish this stroller opened by itself”.

Creativity is the ability to make something new. It’s providing solutions to problems and thinking differently to create new ideas, methods, or objects. Creativity can be learned and having positive characteristics and attitude help one to be creative. If you want to practice creativity, you should have goals and outcomes in your work. You should also quantify your creativity so that you know what is going on and that you can improve your work. Lastly, you can use the creativity techniques mentioned above to boost your creative juices.

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