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352 : APPLYING CREATIVITY TO THE IDEA DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

the imaginative insight to realise that this formula could be rolled out
on a much bigger scale. From such analysis and imagination was the
McDonald’s concept created by Ray Kroc.26

By the same token, insight and imagination have a key role to play
during the planning for implementation step, which is not just the
logic-oriented set of conventional textbook approaches you might
expect. This is the type of creativity exemplified by the fashion designer
with no marketing budget who banned fashion critics from attending
her shows in order to generate interest; or the mass-market sandwich
producer who realised that the principles of silk-screen printing could
be transferred to buttering bread in high volumes. We will investigate
all these imaginative examples in more detail in later chapters,
including the furniture retailer who broke all the conventional rules –
Ingvar Kamprad of IKEA – who features in the case study at the end of
this chapter.

the traditional view of creativity The limitations of the

conventional model of the innovation process are compounded by the
traditional view of creativity which held that only right-brain thinkers
could be creative. Blessed with right-brain dominance, these creative
types were deemed capable of exploiting their unconventional,
unsystematic, artistic and unstructured approach to generate an endless
supply of workable ideas. Those not blessed with the artistic
temperament were deemed to be logical, commonsensical and
analytical. The two groups were held to be mutually exclusive.

Not only do we disagree with the conventional view of the innovation
process, we believe that creativity is wider than just right-brain
thinking. In our view, creativity can best be defined as the effective
combination of intuition (divergent or right-brain thinking) and logic
(convergent or left-brain thinking). Our experience is that everybody
can be creative by combining divergent with convergent thinking,
although this view of creativity runs counter to tradition and practice.

creativity can best be defined as the
effective combination of intuition (divergent
or right-brain thinking) and logic
(convergent or left-brain thinking)