Session 1-4: Demystifying Creativity

M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Date: February - April 2008
Duration: 0 / 61:31

Jing Zhou, Professor of Management, Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University.

This is gonna be different. I've never been to a medical school classroom. I don't know what it's gonna look like, but I'm used to the way I do things. I walk around a lot and I ask questions. So for those of you who have been nodding and who have been thinking about other things I'm gonna ask questions. So this is time to pay attention. I'm gonna talk about how to demystify creativity. First of all little background. I teach creativity at the Rice in the executive MB program where Doctor Wenker Oli was there. The best student are always come from the medical center, because all the rest of the class usually all those readings they very rarely finish them all, and somehow those doctors can always come in and finish reading everything. Their ability to absorb information is just tremendous. But even with that kind of ability I don't think I can compress a semester long course into like a 50 minutes or 60 minutes segment. But I'm gonna try my best to highlight some of the key points that Oli asked me to highlight. First of all I got into this field not because of Doctor Oli Wenker who was entrepreneurial, or Jim you're good at explaining. I got into creativity research because I came to the U.S. to do my PHD and I was sitting in the doctor's seminar finding I was the dumbest person in class. I had no creative ideas. I couldn't come up with any new research findings. I read articles really, really long and hard and thought about those, but I was totally dumb. All the rest of the class could talk and could think; could think outside the box. I couldn't come up with anything. I was extremely frustrated at the beginning, because I said, what's wrong with me? I like what I study. I like this field. You know, patients and nutrition I like it. I was okay growing up in Beijing. I got into Beijing University, so that's not bad. So apparently I, I knew something. I had some ability. Why I could not come out with fresh research ideas. So that whole experience got me into this field to study creativity. So after I got into this field my confidence actually increased. Because just as Jim said, I realized a lot of people, most people actually knew nothing about what creativity truly is and what it requires to be truly creative. There are lots of books on creativity at Barns and Noble. I hope after today your, you're not gonna buy any of those books, because they're not really based on rigorous scientific research at all. They really build on lots of myth about creativity. So my job today, if I do it well, would be to try to demystify what creativity actually, actually is, and to share with you some principles, or some method that might help us to start think creatively. Okay, Jim talk about a lot about why we should be doing this. I'm gonna add two more. So the first quote, I didn't created those, someone else wrote that. The first one says creativity's the driver of our nations prosperity and the progress. The second one says, creativity and innovation is the core of company name, I erased it, of our companies value system. No one here would disagree with that. Anyone disagree with that? This is correct. This I'm so correct. Here's the quiz; here's the question. First one, which country did I pick this first quote from? Second question, which company was the one I colored, I erased?

Poland.

China.

Next.

Doctors are very smart. I know that. Those quotes I did not get them from the U.S. The first one I got it among all those places, I go to China numerous times a day, I go to Asia actually, also Europe. Numerous times I travel about creativity, do creativity projects and consulting all over the world literally. But I pick up the first quote; how many of you have been to Beijing? You know in Beijing those streets, they're called hooto in Chinese. So this is a alley's. This is like alley, little, little alleys. So those little alleys are, people who live there are not, usually not intellectuals. Those are older residents of Beijing who are not very well educated. So this is on their alley, this is Balcho  Alley. This is in the city in Beijing, and there's a bulletin board, I picked that up from there. Of course, I translate it.

[laughter]

Usually those bulletin boards are announcement to tell the residents in this alley, in this Hooto, you know, winter vegetable comes, so go buy vegetable and we store that for the winter. That, the cabbage have come, so buy cabbage. So when I saw this that caught me, caught my attention. This is unusual. This is highly unusual. The second one, which company was that?

IBM?

All the U.S. companies actually talk about that. If you go to all the U.S. company website, all of them say we're innovative, we'll have this culture. But this companies not a U.S. company; I quote them word for word. This is Haier. This is a Chinese electronics company. That if you go to Best Buy, the low-end refrigerator, all of that, all made by Haier. So this is the word they say. This really caught my attention, because in addition to what Jim just shared with us from the international perspective, actually we need to have a huge sense of urgency. I travel; I travel a lot, numerous times a year. I can see when, of course I teach in business schools, so we're analyzing the competitive advantage of every country, and we're proud of being the U.S., because this is the first economy. The most advanced economy in the world. However, what really alarmed me was, I, you know, I do lots of work with U.S. companies as well. I asked those executives, are you aware of Chinese economic development policy? They say sure, they're the factory of the world, we know that. Right? We pick up a paper we're saying that they're low cost, cheap labor, factory of the world. None of those chief decision makers in our private sector, and I don't think in public sector people are aware of that as well, that the Christmas, during Christmas two005, the Chinese Government actually issued the 5 year, 10 year economic development policy, the next 5 or 10 years. They established two main goals in their economic development policy. The two main goals are not low cost being the factory of the world. What are they if you had to guess? If you had to guess, what are those two main goals?

Innovation.

Innovation, creativity were the number one, yes! How about a second one? We're gonna do brand building, brand building, building brand. Because they see the U.S. products and the services can be sold with a high premium. But why, and without good branding, you know, you're worth a lot less, although the functionality are a lot similar. So they're moving up. And a lot of us, especially lots of our executives in the private sector are being really fat and happy. They feel like, you know, we're good at this, you know, they can do the cheaper stuff. We're gonna do this high end type, you know, high cost better stuff. None of those people have talked about I've talked with recognize, even heard about what their competitors are doing. So universities, the not for profit sector can, can really help them. Because I'm not sure, well, I know I'm being recorded, so I'm thinking whether I should be saying this or not, but it's coming out. I can't control it. Is, is that there are lots of, there are lots of leaders, lots of executives at the companies, I'm not sure they can change their mind sight in terms of just looking over a quarter, three months away, what we need to do. So they're not doing nearly enough in terms of promoting innovation and creativity. But I thought, all agreeing now, this is going to be the cornerstone of our economy, of our life hood, and probably for several generations to come; our children's life hood, if want this country to be great, continue to be great. So I see this as that important. Okay. Any questions? Now I know you're doctors, you do lots of research and trials and statistics. Five mice were not enough, you need to be significant. You do evidence based medicine. So all of this piece of slide basically to tell you everything I say about creativity. Everything I teach actually is based on evidence. This is my research area; I've done this 10 plus years. I started, as I shared with you, to be fascinated by how to improve my own creativity. I had no idea how to think out of the box. There are no courses to take, nowhere to learn, no good book to read. Fortunately this has become a very exciting and vibrant research area in the general area of management, managing people in organizations. There's a ten book, which is published to basically summarize what we know so far. This part of research just to sort of, is a very quick overview. This about how research emphasize creativity resides with virtually all of us. Not just scientists or engineers. A lot of people who do research, virtually every human being as long as you have no more level of IQ we could be somewhat creative. I'm not saying we can, we're able capable of doing scientific measures, scientific breakthroughs, but based on what we know so far, every human being somewhat capable of being creative. All sorts of jobs can benefit from creativity. Sure, research and development, but virtually all sorts of jobs in companies or in not-for-profit organizations, there is always a new and a better way of doing things; that's what we call creativity. And I will go there to explain a little more later. So this is just a quick overview. Creativity really is what we call that behavior; it's sort of a tangible outcome. It's a function of your own ability and the situation you are in. So that is a, actually a summary of all the research we've done so far, is the right person needs to be in the right situation to support and stimulate your, your, your potential ability to be creative. And this finding has lots of implications in terms of as individuals; how we can become more creative. And also as research leaders, how we can build a good group, a good lab, and a good organization to foster creativity. Okay? So for now just bear with me, this is sort of an over view, sort of summary kind of thing. In terms of the situation, this whole program research really have, has been focused on identifying the quantity. I do lots of statistical analysis on really focus on identify and the quantify, which aspects, which factors in our work environment that might serve to foster, or more often than not, serve to kill creativity? Creativity gets killed everyday in all organizations. Every single day! So there are lots of things exist in organizations, in companies, or in, at hospitals as research institutions that somehow did not help people to realize their creative potential. So in contrary, serve to kill creativity. So we need to identify those factors and as leaders, as individuals we try to remove those barriers to creativity. Okay, so that's, that's the basic rational behind this program research. The result, actually, highly generalizable across all companies, across all situations, because they've been tested in different kinds of industries. I've done this in petroleum industry, … industry, in healthcare, actually, high technology, banking, construction, you name it. So this is generalizable what we found are generalizable is not industry specific. There are general, there are some general principles that can be used in different kinds of settings. We've done this in the U.S. and Europe, and now we're just starting to do this in Asia. This program of research actually were great for teaching, because when I first started teach creativity courses this was over 10 years ago. By the way, I have a confession to make. Although now I work at Rice, my previous job was at Texas A and M. So you're, you're, you're UT, you're aggie too?

Yes, I am.

Oh. All right. So you're, you're and me versus. So, so, when I first created the course on creativity at Texas A and M, cause I work was my area of specialty, I had a great Dean, very visionary, he said create a course. I couldn't find any good textbooks, any good exercises, nothing basically in the country, in the U.S. to even start with. So you sort of have to build it from scratch. But after systematic program research, we have a lot to say about how to enhance creativity for ourselves at the individual level, and how to build a strong organization or a group to enhance other people's creativity. So this is a incident, this is a example where research and teaching really have synergy, has really build great synergy. The courses are all for that as I mentioned, it really a semester long course in the Executive MBA Program, in the fulltime, daytime MBA program. And those are as a short two-day course in a non-degree executive education program. So there, there versions of those material presented at Rice. Any questions so far? It's so easy to teach in the medical school.

They're all geniuses.

Because, because usually this kind of business slide in business school is gonna take hours to go through. They're gonna disagree with you a lot. Oh, ENPNS? Which part? Executive MBA? The third bullet? This isn't really, I'm gonna talk a lot, a bit more. This is really creativity. I'm using the B to represent it, because my definition of creativity is not your potential. It's something tangible. There's outcome, so there's a behavior. That must influence behavior. So P equals, I mean B equals P by S, means P's the person, S is the situation. So you need to, personally we need to have the right skills and techniques to think creatively. And situation is we need support in contacts, or stimulate contacts to make this happen, to be able to implement and commercialize it. Having a good idea is very hard. Having a good idea and being able to implement and commercialize is even harder. So those need to work together. Just have a smart brain does not lead us to a successful commercialization, nor does it necessarily lead to the, come up with a very creative idea. We have lots of evidence to, to point to that, to, to support this observation. Yeah?

Is creativity in conflict with focus and, cause usually, I mean children tend to be as creative, the term to get from point A to point B, because there's something inside of this. But I think it's the same thing throughout your education. And so some of what you're saying here tacks on creativity, you have to do that in order to actually get people to get to the goal.

This is a great question.

Can I ask you to repeat the question? Keep this.

This is a great question.

And you repeat quick the questions for those

Okay.
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Who watch on the iPod, so they can hear that.

Okay. Okay. I'll do that. The question is a great one. The question is, is creativity in conflict with what we do as, as grownups in organization. The organizations are rules and processes and they're right a way of doing things. Children are, they seem to be very creative, but they cannot focus their attention. So they're in conflict between creativity and the focus and attention. Can I answer that by, by defining creativity first? Cause I think that would get to that. This is the first potential misunderstanding about creativity. Cause when I started creativity I go to companies to interview people. Of course, the managers say, my employees not creative at all, so do something. They need help. We need you to do something. And employees when you interview them, they come, they tell you that's not true. I try to make suggestions to suggest ways of making things better; they never listen to me. So clearly the first big thing about creativity is the definition. I'm I'm not a researcher; you're a researcher with a lot of definitions. Without definition we don't see things eye to eye. So what is creativity? It's very simple; it's the production of novel and potentially useful ideas. Those ideas could be about products, could be about services, could be about working methods, could about manufacturing methods, could about everything we do. Doesn't have to limit to just products or services. Doesn't have to limit to technology. Of course, technology could be a huge part of this. So given this definition, creativity. If you're not an artist, I'm gonna exclude artists, because I'm, I'm, I'm just not artistic. So let's just forget about being artist. Creativity, you're not artist. Creativity for us, there are two components, two main parts in this definition that are very important. First of all, there should be some novelty involved. This is  the realissue. Secondly, it should be useful, or potentially useful. By useful, so based on this definition, if accountant, I know there's a certified financial problem, if our accountant cook the book, it's not creativity, because it's not useful for the organization. It's wrong. It's not legal, or not legitimate, or not ethical. Okay. It's not novel either. So this has to be both new and potentially useful. Doesn't' have to; the usefulness doesn't have to be manifested right away. But somehow by working on this some more we can somehow make this useful, we can trade patient. So if this definition, if you accept this definition, then children do demonstrate a lot of creativity, because they don't have this structure yet. However, their type of creativity is not exactly the same as commercial liable creativity that we talk about, because of this usefulness damage. Okay. There's another thing, very important, relevant to that question is, there's a fundamental paradoxy between creativity and the formal organization. I think your questions that's also implied. Is creativity always involve doing something new? The formal organization, or the society, or medical field, whatever field you're in, set up, there's a status quo. There's a widely accepted way of doing things, a structure. So by definition people tend to prefer the known and already established way of doing things, and the very skeptical of anything new. So there's a fundamental contradicting two forces, there's a tension between creativity and existing way of doing things. That's why creativity is so hard. Okay? Thank you for the great question. The next one, is this born or made?

Yes. [laughter]

That's another thing we found is, of course, it's both. I, I was reading lots of medical journals at end of last year; I will share with you at the end why I was doing that. But the more I'm reading, the more I become more frightened. Because the gene I apparently play a large part in, in, in lots of things happen later in life. But in terms of creativity this is the what we know now. That we can learn, all of us can learn techniques to become more creative tomorrow, if we learn something today. So say, if we measure our baseline today, we go through a creativity technique training tomorrow, the day after tomorrow if we're measured again, being tested again, we're gonna improve all our baseline. Okay? I'm talking about within person comparison; I'm not talking about a cross person comparison. This is important, because there, there are different baselines. Okay, so a lot of doctors might ask, what is the relationship between IQ and creativity? IQ level intelligence and creativity? My dissertation committee member asked a question, why do you study this, if you're smart, you're creative. So there's a strong positive correlation between IQ and creativity. People are shaking your head, you're absolutely right. This is a relationship we found. So this is creativity, this is a IQ score. I didn't do this study; this was a meta analysis. I know I don't have to explain this; you all do this. At least you all read papers that did this. Somebody did a meta analysis on all the studies done in the past; there are hundreds, investigating the relationship between IQ and the creativity. Again, this creativity, our definition is something tangible. You've demonstrated that. This is not your mental process. So for example, you can now go to Ollies office tomorrow and say, well you talk about money yesterday. Give me some money, because last night I had a brainy idea. I had a great idea. I had a cup of beer and I had a great idea, but I went to bed. I forgot about it. But there are lots of mental process going on. I had lots of creative moments; therefore I deserve to be funded. That's not my definition of creativity. My definition is new and the useful have to be something tangible. Cannot be a mental cognitive process in your head. So this is important. If we look at the creativity this way, a demonstrated behavior, something tangible, not just mental potential, then the relationship between IQ and the creativity look like this. That means the normal level of IQ. You have to be normal. So I think if you're above the normal level of IQ. The relationship between creativity and IQ is negligible. I mean still slightly positive, but, but it's not something worth invested in. So, so this meta analysis put the debate to rest. Namely in the normal population we don't really have to worry too much about measuring IQ scores and see, you know, trying to promote creativity that way. Okay? So this shows that creativity what we all have the potential to be creative, as long as we have some normal level of intelligence. Therefore, the focus should not be focusing on who's smart, should be focused on something else. What else? I want to mention, there's another misunderstanding about creativity. When I talk with managers, some of them might mention, well, you know those creative people are kind of weird. You know, people at Austin with long hair, ratty cloths, and then they, they, they, they lock themselves in the, in a dark room, and over night they become creative. So the notion, I'm making this more dramatic than they sound like. But a notion is the misunderstanding is creativity. And so its down by a long genius. Somehow you close the door, you think really hard, somehow you had the brilliant idea. Our research shows that's not the case. It's a social process. You relook at lots of people who have been able to commercialize their good idea. They may not have, have the best idea, or even the most creativity idea, but they are good at talking with people; people who are not in their filed, and that's really helpful. I know this is not exactly what you had in mind, because you want them to do both through good science and commercialize it. But mike, my job, Michael is to open up their thinking. Put no count strings or boundaries in terms of thinking about what kind of things can be commercialized. We should not have this preconceived notion that only the best, most are the ones signs can be commercialized. Sometimes when you're, when you do the best signs, most of it involves sands. You're too early. You can be too early. So we wanted to do both good signs, and at a same time, nothing rule anything out.  If my finding, my research, if this, this scene is not in the best or most creative in my scientific file doesn't mean it cannot be commercialized. So I, so let's have no constraints. Any disagreements? People are staring at me.

Sure. Sure. No.

I'm not saying, I'm not saying do not patent, or do not do the most advanced science. I'm saying, when we talk about creativity let's have no count strings. No pre conceived notion of what this might lead to. If this is a patentable result, you're at the cutting edge of anything, that's great. Do it! However, a lot of us when we try to be creative, there are lots of findings that way stumble into, encounter. We become the first to have the harshest judge, when rule out the possibility right away. For example, we're all familiar of this three com case  Post-it note case. I'm sorry, 3M, it's not three con. There's a case of three coms being sold, and also, so, so I'm thinking about that. 3M Post-it note case. Where for me, how did that come into being, the product?

The glue didn't work.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So the chemist, the chemist were playing with, with their chemical compound. They had something else in mind. They tried to make something sticky, a glue. But what he got was not what he envisioned. So the experiment failed. The experiment was not successful at all. If 3M did not have the culture to encourage conversation, and to encourage people to have an open mind, not to be so evaluative to rule out possibilities this would have never happened, this product. But because of this supportive culture, the experiment, although it was a failure, he talk about this with colleagues and he actually did not do anything beyond that. Someone else pick up this experiment and played with it some more. And eventually they got a product. So this was not a most successful scientific experiment or discovery, but because of their open mind, they just keep playing with it and got a product. Not a most scientific one, but it was a, one of the most successful commercially. So, so in the process anything can happen. Creativity there is a, is a, sort of a chance event. It's not 100% certainty. So in the process do not close our minds say, wow this is not what I wanted, this is not what I planned for. Therefore, I'm gonna discard it. I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna start over. Don't do that. Anything interesting keep an open mind, and good thing for my patent. Again, patents great, but don't rule out anything else. Okay? So it's a social process. Some of you, all of us have fancy degrees, numerous degrees, several degrees. So the question many of us had in our mind is, well, knowledge is good, I'm gonna study a lot. I, there, there's several cases in China where the father enrolled the sun in a university at age of 13. The reason was, if you start a university at age 13, you graduate by the age of 17. Graduate from college. Then you do a PHD. And then you do another PHD. You do two PHD's, and somehow you can be, you know, you can win a noble price, cause you have two PHD's. Implicit, implicit in this kind of practice is the more knowledge you have, the better; the more creative you can become. True or false? This I've seen a lot of academics, good researchers have this implicit notion about creativity. Now you see my logic, I'm trying to sort of have different examples about different potential barriers to creativity. So our misunderstanding about creativity, this one, and that is classic, and they show what the finding, you know, what the research actually shown. So hopefully this way's gonna help us to demystify creativity, to have a better understanding about what that is. I have a case to share with you about knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and the creativity. I think this relevant for all of us. These I'm gonna talk about your beloved, beloved Texas A and M a little bit more. That was my first academic job. When you actually first started as assistant professor life was very easy. You do really good research; I mean not easy, but readily speaking, what I have to do now. It was easy. You do good research, a business school is very important to teach very well, and it's very hard to teach well, so you spend a lot of time on it. And of course, you do good service in the department. So I try to do it all at Texas A and M. I grew up in Beijing. How many of you have been to College Station? It was hard. Was, was, was hard for me. Not much to do, and a great, great place for assistant professors. But cultural wise I was, was not very interesting. So I bought a house as close to Houston as possible, and that was my last resort at that time. So I do a lot of fieldwork with companies in Houston. So I rely on their data to study creativity. So usually, this is my, this is what my weight looked like back then. Monday through Thursday I work on my teaching at the office, and, and do my service. So that was my calendar. On Friday and plus the weekend, I stay at home, do research. So that was my plan. One Thursday evening I was checking me email, because my plan was tomorrow, Friday, I'm gonna do daytime analysis write this paper, so I need this email from vice president of a company. She was supposed to send me data, email me data. She promised. Thursday night before I left office for home her email didn't come. Of course, I have no data. I didn't have data. So I drove home. Home was only half an hour from office, but Collage Station standard that was long, that was far away. So Friday morning I work up, I, I'm, I'm ready to work, but I was faced with the dilemma. When I say this don't laugh, but I was really living in dark ages. The only connection I had at that time was the external world was the traditional telephone. I had no, I had no internet connection, because I really wanted to focus. I mean, the internet was too exciting, and I, I, you can spend lot of time on internet. So the only thing I had was a traditional telephone. Then I didn't know what to do. I was thinking about driving back to office to check my email, because I couldn't check email at home. I was thinking about driving back to my office to check email to see whether the email came and the data came with it, because I needed data. That was my plan for the day. But in College Station on Friday, there's lots of colleagues. Especially those very well established, you know, my older colleagues. They have nothing to do; they become very chatty on Friday's. So if you go to office and don't have a focused the goal, you can easily got dropped into, grown into conversation and waste the whole day. And I, I couldn't afford to waste a whole day. So I'm, I'm struggling. I'm like, okay, if I drive to office and data didn't come then that, that waste a trip, I waste a time. Potentially wasting the more time by chatting with people. If I don't drive back there I have nothing to do today. So I was pacing back and forth in the room. And I pick up my telephone, this is my only, only connection with the outside world. I look at phone, I'm like, oh my goodness, what if I can dial the number, dial my office number by using this traditional telephone. And once it dialed in my office number, I push a button connecting my email, my computer, and just to hear the lesson, whether that email came or not. I do not need to check all the emails there. All I need to know is to hear who has written me email. If I know Kathy wrote me a email, she's the vice president that was going to send me the data, of course I will make the drive. I'll drive to office, because chances are the data's there. I will pick up, or download and come back. If after calling in and listening to all the senders, there's nothing from Kathy, this company representative, then I'm not gonna drive. The more I think about it, the more I'm like, Oh, my goodness; this is a brilliant idea. This was in 90, the early 90. So I call my friend at the high tech company. You know, the top 100 high tech company in the U.S. He worked in R and D. He's got a PHD I know. So I say, so and so, I've got this brilliant idea, what do you think? You can make a product out of this. Right? By calling your office, using this traditional telephone, call your office, check your email, hearing the email voice, and, and, and, and know who send you an email. He's got a PHD in electrical engineering, so I trusted him. He after, you heard what I told him; he said, wow, you're too naive, this cannot be done. Because he said, this is why, because telephone are making this kind of phone call, this is acoustic signal. So he's goes to, I couldn't, I'm okay; acoustics' signal. And the way you transmit acoustic signal, you know, you can either compress it, decompress it, it's long distance, so you loose some accuracy in the middle of that. There are noise, introduce, you loose accuracy. So technically this is challenging. Now when you dial in your office that's the email screen, that's like imagining signal. So it's a different kind of signal. Imaging where you transmit always comprised, decompressed, goes through he same process. You also loose accuracy. Now you're asking more, he said, he said, now you're asking that acousting signal to talk with the image signal. You're gonna loose even more accuracy. That's even more technically challenging. Therefore, in conclusion this cannot be done. Fine. He's got a PHD in electrical engineering, he says this can't be done; this can't be done. So I drop the idea. Now what happened? What happened? It can't be done and it has been done. You could do it; you can do this right? You can, you can do the stuff on email, all of this. We know what that is. So the story, the, the story, what I learned from this, and hopefully you'll all agree with me is, is now I can the, the more you know about a field the better. My friend, he knows a lot about that field. At that time I only knew he's got a PHD in electrical engineering, he's got U.S. Patents, he knows the field. Later on I found out his PHD, his area was not only in electrical engineering, specifically in digital signal processing. So this was his field. But lesson for all of us is, another barrier to creative thinking is the more you know about a field, maybe you know too much about what cannot be done. I'm not saying the more you know the dumber you become. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a possibility we become very fixated and become string by the current knowledge in the field. And this current thinking somehow server as a barrier to creativity. Serve as a box; we're all boxing in. Therefore, it cannot think outside of the box. So a lot of us do research in a very well established field. Many of us actually do very incremental work. I mean, they're new and valuable. But within the wealth you find the box. So that's why a lot of us when we have great degrees, it does not mean those degree does not necessarily lead to more ability to think creatively. So that's another thing that we need to keep in mind. So as you can imagine I still see this friend at parties this years. At least once a year.

Of course, I need to be his friend, because I won't be able to tell this joke. So at, at all the parties this is the best joke I come up with, and people always have a good laugh of it. Now, you know, I hate him. I say I hate you! And of course, he probably hate it himself. Because he, you know, if he listened to me, he and I probably still be both working with we love what we do. But only motivation would be intrinsic motivation, right? Where we'll have no extrinsic motivation what so ever. So this is a lesson learned for all of us is having a lot of domain rather than knowledge, does not necessarily lead to more ability to be creative. How do we learn creative thinking skills and techniques? So you say, I understand knowledge is not, does not necessarily lead to creativity. So how can we get these skills and strategies? Research have shown that, yes this can be trained. I already mentioned this. The problem is, if you really look at which school where the trainings being done we feel hopeless, because since elementary school, our teachers do a better job of killing creativity than promoting right? And all the schools socialization basically this is right answer. There's, you know, this is, this is what you ought to do. This is right, that is not. That's a, that's not appropriate. So other than our schools there are creative writing schools, there are very little training available. So if all of us are interested in creativity, this is the first thing we need to do is find a way to enhance our own ability to think outside the box. I'm gonna share with you a couple example. I don't have time to, to, to really those techniques today, but to get a flavor of what I mean by that. And the second one is the effective work environment. The supportive work environment. So both are important for creativity. In terms of skills, this is just a sampler. Okay, how many of us do brainstorming? All of us, all the time. If I tell you brainstorming, most brainstorming sessions don't work, how do you feel? Don't feel good at all. Well, I'm speaking from new research showing the recorded and analyzed, most brainstorming sessions, if you don't run this correctly, it actually doesn't work. Why? Why? I don't have time to do an exercise today, but you know we can do this. If we had time I can demonstrate this very easily, never fail. Because when we do brainstorming we usually, you know, have free flow of ideas. We make suggestions. You talk, I listen, then I talk. But we don't creativity training, people working in the group setting usually are better at thinking to conform, than thinking divergently. So our better conformity than thinking creatively. So brainstorming session, after a session, we probably feel very good about it, because there seem to be a lot of ideas got generated during the session. But if we truly analyze those ideas, a lot of them, I'm not saying all sessions are bad. I'm saying many, okay; there could be successful sessions if you run this right. But many if you don't run this right, those ideas, although they're large quantity, there small variations along sort of a similar lines of thinking. So they're not completely thinking outside of the box kind of session that we were hoping for. Does this make sense? So lot of times we'll have lots of ideas, but more or less along what we've already been doing, instead of completely coming up with a new breaking idea. Okay? What is thinking inside the box? I'm asking you to enhance your creative ability by thinking inside the box. What does that mean? There techniques, there formulas for creativity. If we become aware of those formulas, we can definitely think more creatively. I have time to just list three. First of all, many of us think creativity involves total creation. We have to have a major scientific discovery that we're the number one person, the first ever person in the whole world who did this. Who did that, you know, Einstein, Einstein kind of creativity. When we think about commercializable ideas, more often than not we need to go after the second and the third type of creativity. The second type is called synthesis.  The first type is creation; the second type is synthesis. What is synthesis? You bring two or more previously unrelated phenomena and combine or entity, whatever that might be. Whatever your field is. You combine them and make them a new entity. This is synthesis. If we really analyze successful products, technological advancement, a lot of those actually is a product of combining previously existing, but unrelated things into one. We can have lots of examples of that. What's your example? Can you give me a couple of examples?
 
Yeah. Great. Telephone iPod. Telephone, television screen. You combine the television screen with the telephone; you got a videophone. When we do this it's important to break your assumptions. And always in the class we talk a lot about assumptions. I don't have time to run exercise now. but a lot of times we're not able to think outside the box is because there are lots of assumptions. We're so well educated we take lots of things for granted. This is the definition or assumption in my field. I cannot break that. For example, there's a successful product, crazy product called a vitamin water. When I first saw the product; do you drink that? Do you drink? When I first saw that product, I'm like this can never be successful. You know, you take a vitamin, you drink water, it's so easy. Who would be so dumb to buy, you know you put vitamin into the water. They can just put out themselves. It's very successful. The company has just been sold. It's been hugely successful. So when I say no one will buy this, this was assumption on my part that become invalid. So to be able to think about things creatively is you always question your underlining assumptions. You are, you assume there's a boundary, certain things cannot happen. And you challenge it. You say, really? Really, no one will buy it? They cannot be combined? We don't have time to exam lots of business cases. But a lot of, I would say, a vast majority of successful products or services are the result of creativity, synthesis. So this is what I mean by thinking inside of the box. There are formulas. Total creation is great. If you, we can do the Rick Smaley kind of thing, Nobel Prize, go for it. But don't look down upon synthesis, because this is where lots of alternatives are. The third type of creativity, by thinking inside the, what I mean by thinking inside the box is called modification. Modification. Is you take one existing products or services and change it to make it something else. Is this a friendly reminder that I'm out of time? No. I know I, I need to wrap this up pretty quickly. I'm not making this up. How many, how many of you are from the Great Britain? Oh, great. So I can say anything I want about the U.K. Ah, this is, this is true, yeah I know. There's a key, there a company that sells tea bags. Since 1951 the company has been selling squared tea bags. You know, British they drink lot of tea. But you sell square tea bags. But of course, after certain years, after this many years the cells have been flattered. You know, the markets saturated. So how can we increase sales? People have been thinking about ways of doing that, none were successful. And there's a young man propose an idea. He said to change the square of the tea bags to round. Fortunately the managers listened to him. This is sound not very brilliant, but they were desperate, so they adapted idea. The next couple of years the sales went up 15%. Nothing was changed. The teabag go from square to round. This is a classic example of modification, of modification. I can go on, on, on, on. So a lot of us very good scientist, but commercial, in the commercial area a funny thing happened. How to make modification happen? The key thing is to be good, not just at our own field, but to be knowledgeable at a totally different field. This would help with synthesis and the modification. One example. I don't know where you live, but where I live close here, lots of my neighbors are in the energy industry. And the industry have done well, so all my neighbors have either moved into larger houses, or have done renovation in their current houses. So they're rich. So I'm joking with them. I'm like, okay, the next step is going to buy a second home on Florida, so on. Many of them tell me, we want to do that, because it takes a lot of time and energy, even if you had money, to maintain a second house. Therefore the real-estate industry have this brilliant idea. We don't sell houses, second home. We sell timeshare. This is an idea. We all know timeshare ideas; it's a very successful idea in real-estate industry. How to be creative. They say it took more than 15 years for this timeshare ideas to travel from real-estate industry to the private jet industry. Same idea. Timeshare. No one wants to park an airplane in his backyard. I'm joking, but, but I'm only going to buy the ride to use this private jet for 30 days a year. Okay? Why it took so long is, because people stay within, within their own field, and don't know what's going on in other fields. So this is the where creativity usually comes from. If you can bridge, if you can serve as the bridge between different fields. So for those of us who are interested in commercialization, the next thing you could do is to become knowledgeable. You don't have to know a whole lot. But talk with people in the different field, or help us both to create a product, and also really to gage what customers, potential customer, will want. So when I say thinking inside of the box, I provided a formula. There are three types of creativity. We need to have a portfolio. Not just focusing exclusively on total creation, that's great, but also keep an eye on synthesis and the modification. Because they have shown, those two are much more easily to do, and the much more profit. Any questions? So we talk a little bit, I gave a few samplers about training, but I don't have time to talk too much about technique, because that would involve exercises. But now you got a flavor. Also working environment matter. This is a typical org chart. There's a leader and bunch of coworkers. Here's what I found, Again, give a bunch of samplers to show us what kinds of person versus situation in direction I've been talking about earlier. That formula. B equals P times situation S. This one shows what? So this is a kind where we see three way in directions, statistical analysis. But conceptually, what does this mean? This means job desatisfaction. Some degree of dissatisfaction about something is good, because this gives you a trigger to change, to change. So this one shows the, the solid dark line shows, when people are dissatisfied with their job, and they can now quit for whatever reason. They can't say, I'm just gonna sell my house and move to California. They can't do that for whatever reason. And their organization provides support. There's a culture support creativity. Now we have this, now here with your office. People become creative it goes up. So the horizontal line is the degree of dissatisfaction from low to high. And the vertical line is creativity from low to high. This shows when you're unhappy, be very happy about it, because you may have a trigger for creativity. So one way to be creative, I'm making this sound very simple, but there, you know, there's a technique. We can talk about if we had time is write things down. Whatever makes you feel inconvenient, unhappy about anything in your daily life, write it down and find a way to solve it? This is a sort of creativity for minding people. Is when you become dissatisfied, actually you should be happy? Because you just found out probably where a lot of other people also dissatisfied. Okay? So this is one thing we could do also. This another thing is, what if some of us are just not creative? We don't' have this creative personality. We just don't. I mean, we're not; we're not open enough.. This one is fascinating to me. This solid line showed even those, for those the horizontal line is supervisor behavior from, from bad supervising. Where close monitoring, make sure people don't do what they're not told to do. They need to follow orders. To the right hand side. This is good kind of supervising, give people freedom, give them support, give them stimulation. So that's the horizontal line. The vertical line is employee's creativity, going from low to high. This dark solid line showed for people who are not creative in terms of, as the personality trait. When they somehow came up with creative peers. In other words, they have creative role models to work together with, and their supervisors give them freedom, they could become creative. This is what I mean by B equals, P times S, if situation mattered. So if we want to become creative, somehow we need to hook up with people, no matter which field they're in, the creative thinkers. Just by association, by being around them we somehow learn their passing knowledge. Again, I'm making this sound very simple, but this statement is based on tons of data to show this. So who have with people who are good at it?  A lot of us say diversity's good for creativity. If people from better or worst, I mean people with different function of background, so you just talk about synthesis. I just mentioned synthesis. What it would bring different people from different field in the medial school together, we synthesis. Research, the relationship between diversity and the creativity is one of the biggest myths, mystery, that, that that I'm faced with. Some people say this is great, but when you actually go to organization you don't always find this. The result here show, okay, so on the horizontal line, this is education specialization diversity. So going from left to right. Right means you have a group of people who are very high on this variable, meaning they come from different kinds of functional background. They're trained in different field. And the vertical line is total creativity by this team of individuals. What we found is, functional background diversity did not automatically lead to creativity. If you look at their correlations it's not significant statistically. What you need is transmissional leadership. You need a leader who are able to transform this team to be able to work together to pull the potential, the creativity out of those individuals. So leadership is very important. We need transmissional leadership, and I don't have time to go into too much detail to talk about what this is, and how to get that. But at least now we know. This is why diversity don't always lead to creativity. Because if you just look at  their correlation, they're not significant. Okay? Another thing I said academic. I, I, I, I sort of share similar experience with you. You know what this is?  This was on Sunday, what was on TV? She won the best original screenplay, this is the, this is the winner, she, she's a new writer. So as academic we always think, wow, good ideas will sell themselves. As long as they come up with a good idea, people are gonna buy it. VC's  people, I mean VC's, people with money, or, or, the future customer are gonna buy that? Really? Do we agree with that? This is the what a lot of academics don't, are not good at. Is it takes tremendous skill to sell your idea. Again, research have shown, just have a good idea. The idea itself, lot of ideas, Again, they're exceptions, but a lot of ideas inherently is very hard to judge their commercial potential. So they judge by how you behave, how you present it. Judge by lot of other things, other than the idea itself. So hopefully, in this course we'll learn how to sell ideas. And it's an art. It's important to know how to cell our ideas too. Okay? We need to not just imagine that our idea is going to be commercializable, and, then, then, then, then can be sold, but can be bought by others. I'm a big and go against the notion of listening to customers. Cause lots of times customers do not know what they want or what they need. Therefore, another thing about creativity that's important to note is instead of going, asking what people want or need, we treat ourselves, we see ourselves as economic partner of our customers. We first analyzed what their problems are, and then think about how we can help them to solve those problems. Again, there are lots of cases I can talk about in this regard. But looking at Cassies watch, I don't think I have time. I have like two seconds. So this is important. So there are lots of textbooks saying, lots new customers. If you ask a customer, if you ask anybody a hundred years ago, will you buy a microwave oven? They're gonna say no, I don t' need it. Right? No, no customer is gonna tell you, I need a microwave oven, so make one. There's not gonna tell you that. But we need to really see, change our mindsets, see our self as their economic partner. See who has a problem, and how we can help them solve problem? Okay? Of course I think Jim and Oli talk about this already. Fundamentally, entrepreneurship and the creativity is about lot what we do, and have a passion. And also, knowing that what we do is important. In this regard I think you work in a very good field, because your field inherently is very important. You're trying to help other people. I always knew this conceptually, but starting end of last year I have a personal experience that I really feel what you do is a very important. Your creativity, your passion is hugely important in terms of making a difference. End of last year, last September I got a phone call. Now my father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. So, so since then that influenced me very hard, I've been trying to, you know, find a way for him to tell him do this, do that. What I learned was there not much help in this case. So they really make me feel what you do is very important. And, and your creativity, your entrepreneurship is going to make a huge difference. So please accept my best wishes. I, I really feel like what you do is very, very important. I support that. And that, thank you very much.