I recently went to an excellent presentation on innovation hosted PRSA St. Louis. The speaker was Kathie Thomas of Fleishman Hillard (headquartered here in St. Louis). She’s their innovation guru, and this presentation was also presentated at a national PRSA conference. I thought I’d share a few bits of her presentation that I found interesting.
What’s your innovation style?
Just like personalities, people bring different innovation styles to the table.
Visioning
To imagine the ideal future
- What is the ideal long-term solution?
- What if we started from scratch?
- Why not?
Modifying
To refine and optimize what has come before
- What can we do to improve upon and optimize what we’ve done?
- What has been done before that we can build upon?
Exploring
To discover new and novel possibilities
- What assumptions can we challenge, and what new ideas would result?
- What is a metaphor for this situation – and how does it give us new insights and ideas?
Experimenting
To combine and test many combinations
- How can we get other people’s creative input on this?
- What can we combine to put together a new solution?
Which style are you?
I think I am a modifying style, although sometimes I also employ the exploring style.
