encouraging business ideas

I recently spent a week as the 'King' of Geraldton in Western Australia.

I had written a book on Why I want to be King of Australia (Penguin Australia). This was well received. A very dynamic mayoress of Christchurch, New Zealand, was flying to a conference in Geraldton and picked up a copy of the book at Sydney airport. She read it on the flight and liked it. So she recommended that Geraldton ask me to be its 'King'. Which I agreed to for a week.

The idea sounds preposterous because it was designed to be preposterous. The interesting thing, however, is that, once the initial concept had been accepted, all sorts of creativity was let loose in implementing the idea.

There was a 'pompmobile' for me to ride upon. There were court jesters in bizarre costumes. There were concerts and a procession. There was even a special 'King's' flag. One store announced a 'King's week sale'.

Just as a big crystal grows around a tiny seed so the whole town got organised to make sense of the 'King's week'.

BROAD THEME
Creativity from scratch, from a blank sheet, is difficult. But once a broad theme has been set, then many people find that they can be creative in the direction of that theme.

The broad theme provides starting points. You can create forward from such points. Your creations provoke, demand and inspire creativity from others. If there is to be a royal procession, the King has to ride in the procession. So the idea of a 'pompmobile' is triggered. If the King is to wear a crown, then a crown has to be designed. All sorts of needs and possibilities suddenly appear.

It could also be argued that the acceptance criteria for creative ideas in such a situation are not very stringent. A mechanical device has to work. A financial scheme has to be legal and has to make profits. For the King's week it was enough that something was striking, fun, bizarre and vaguely royal.

It is said that the Impressionist painters mainly knew each other. Once the momentum had got going, it kept going. It might have been very difficult for a lone painter to have painted in that style.

There is the momentum of direction. There is the momentum of cross stimulation. There is the momentum of acceptance.

In the end a new idea occurs in the mind of one person. Group creativity may work in the brainstorming of advertising agencies, but in other areas it is not so successful at starting ideas (but may be useful to develop them further).

There is a difference between group creativity and 'cluster' creativity. In the business world the effects of cluster are appreciated. A collection of high-tech companies in a geographical area becomes more productive. Others join the original companies and the cluster grows.

Cluster creativity means that, if other creative individuals are having creative ideas around you, then you will be more inclined to have creative ideas. It may be no more than the 'mood of permission' to have ideas. Or it may be the direct stimulating effect of another idea when the operating concept is applied elsewhere.

EFFORT
In the end creative effort does produce creative results. If a group of people are stimulated to make a sustained creative effort, there will be results. The key is the word 'sustained'.

It is difficult for most individuals to make a 'sustained' creative effort on their own. But when everyone around is making such an effort, then your 'low' point is only temporary rather than a permanent creative shut-down.

In practical terms, 'incubators' achieve this cluster effect. The de Bono Institute in Melbourne is setting up just such an incubator in the new building in Collin Street.

On the whole creative people tend to be generous with their creative thinking. They see it as a skill which improves with use rather than as a 'mine' which might get depleted. As you deal with different fields, different idioms and different processes you continually re-stock your repertoire of concepts and possibilities.

Furthermore in the competitive interchange of ideas you get some ideas back. It is like the currency of gossip. You provide some gossip in order to receive new gossip. TASKS AND DIRECTIONS
Does creativity work best when there is a very specific target or a broad direction?

Tasks do not generate many approaches. You have to search around for an approach which seems to lead forward. With a broad direction it is possible to explore many approaches, all of which are heading in the same direction. One or other of these directions turns out to be useful, but all of them are pursued far enough to allow that to happen. With a specific task the selection 'cut-off ' is much earlier. Unpromising approaches are not followed far enough to become useful.

Just as a broad concept embraces many specific ways of delivering that concept, so a broad direction accepts many different paths. A skilled designer knows exactly when to 'tighten' the brief. Should it be tight at the beginning, mid-way or the end?

For the momentum of creativity to pick up, the ideas do not all have to be great ideas. It is enough that around each one there is both novelty and benefit. To this can be added a little 'surprise': why did we not think of that? ACCEPTANCE
There seem to be a lot of inventions in war time because there is real need and no cost cut-off. The same thing happens when there is a broad direction for the creativity. Ideas can more easily be accepted because they do indeed contribute to the way forward in that 'broad direction'. The tighter the target, the better your shooting has to be.

If the matter of intellectual property rights could be worked out, there would be value in an Internet 'inventor' site where half-formed ideas could be exchanged and developed. The difficulties are huge.

These would not so much be difficulties of 'stealing ideas' as of assessing the different contributions from different people. Perhaps there could be a simple rule: that all contributions are 'gratis', but a percentage of all idea successes must be paid back into a fund to be used to benefit all contributors.

If a graph is made of the number of patents issued to inventors, the curve is not smooth. A few famous inventors have a large number of patents and then rather more inventors have far fewer patents. This may result from a sort of personal 'cluster effect'. The more successful inventing you do, the better you get at it.