The Brainzooming Group

This month’s #Ideachat (organized by Angela Dunn on Twitter) was guest hosted by author Jennifer Louden and focused on the extent to which people either claim or hide borrowing ideas from others. Jumping in late, the group was addressing topics such as the impact on your creativity of others borrowing your creative ideas and whether ideas can be “owned” in this day and age.

On the former topic, my response was it all depends on who borrowed the creative idea, if I wanted them to borrow it, & whether they matched up my ideas or content with other people. If they put me in good company, that can be quite a kick.

If you’re really intent on getting something done and think you have a creative idea to realize positive change, the best thing that can happen is others claiming ownership of your ideas. Maybe you accomplish this by being obvious and blatantly saying, “Here, TAKE MY IDEA!” Often though, you have to be much more subtle and kind of leave your creative idea “mentally” laying around for others to find and claim . . . much like they might pick a coin up off the ground and consider it found money.

Leave Your Ideaprints on a Creative Idea

As the #Ideachat group discussed idea ownership, my response was that in the world of social media, it seems you own an idea by being able to point to your first use and predominant sharing of it. I cited Joe Pulizzi and content marketing as a prime example. Joe put a term to the concept, developed it, and shared it for others to expand upon it. What was important was it was readily apparent Joe Pulizzi was the first person everyone remembers talking about content marketing as an idea.

As I tweeted during #Ideachat, when you put an idea out there for others to use, it’s a good idea to leave your “ideaprints” all over it, just as Joe did.

Just like finerprints, ideaprints are indicators you had your brain all over an idea before releasing it into the world. Maybe the idea was yours originally. Maybe you adapted the idea from something else. Either way, if you’ve added value to an idea, your ideaprints signal your brain touched the idea somewhere (ideally early) in its life.

I’m sure Seth Godin has written about something like ideaprints, and there’s a marketing company using the name, but here some ideas for how to place your ideaprints on an idea:

1. Secure the typical and appropriate legal protections available – copyright, trademark, patent
2. Develop a unique or at least distinctive name to describe the idea
3. Frequently use the distinctive name you created online and in other places
4. Develop your idea into a more fully fledged concept
5. Author a great deal of content about the idea that continues to expand on, describe, and make it more usable by others
6. Make it easy for others to advance the idea whether in total or in part
7. Create an organization that embodies your idea
8. Cultivate a group of people who will point back to you when others ask them where they heard of the idea
9. License the idea to others

There are definitely more ways to leave ideaprints, but amid our #Ideachat conversation, those were the first ones that came to mind.

Making It Obvious Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea

I think being adept at leaving ideaprints on your most important ideas is an important skill to hone.

One of the last #Ideachat topics covered whether challenges in attributing ideas in the 21st century will lead to more or less creativity. My answer was it depends on the attitude people have toward ideas. People who spend their time chasing down others to protect their ideas will spend a lot less time on generating ideas and a disproportionate amount of time on idea protection.

Far better to spend much of your time coming up with ideas, a little time being more obvious with your ideaprints, and most of your time making things happen with your ideas – whether it’s you or others doing big things with them! – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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It’s always fun when there is a perspective from Dilbert on creativity. I’ll admit my surprise though the first time I read through the Sunday Dilbert as the boss looks for an employee who is creative.  This particular Dilbert comic seems ripe for being viewed as insensitive.

The more I thought about this Dilbert comic (and trust me this is not a perspective based on schooled psychology) though, it illustrates a point at the heart of so many messages about creativity and innovation on this blog.

This potential employee claims his particular combination of ADHD, dyslexia, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia definitely makes him creative, with Dilbert checking the Internet to find each of them does indeed correlate highly with creativity.

Who Is Creative and Who Is Not?

When you think about it, those conditions and other genetic or developmental issues people have that are considered outside the “norm” cause them to experience, process, and respond to life in very different ways than most of society does. Those differences may be more frequently perceived as “creative” specifically because they aren’t the typical responses of most people.

We see creativity in unique, or at least unusual, responses we wouldn’t have imagined. If everyone had been able to come up with comparable responses, they’d be run of the mill and not creative.

Learning from Dilbert on Creativity

That’s why it’s vital, if you want to be more consistently creative, to mine the perspectives you have or can manufacture that place you outside the norm. These atypical perspectives can cause you to experience, process, and respond in very different ways than everyone else might, thus enhancing your creativity.

Where do those atypical views come from in your life?

They can emerge from a variety of places, including these:

• Your distinctive talents and interests
• From how people with different roles than you approach things
• By looking at things the way a kid does in a grown up world
• Through doing things the way they’re done outside your industry
• Trying to mimic more extreme creative perspectives

Go find the perspectives where you aren’t “a normal” (in the words of the Dilbert comic) and create away with your atypical self! - Mike Brown

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I was in Nebraska City, NE the last weekend of April to attend the board meeting for Nature Explore (a client) and the annual Arbor Day festivities. My road trip from Kansas City provided several intriguing photo opportunities carrying worthwhile branding, creativity, and strategy lessons.

Branding Decisions – What do you think of Stoner Drug?

Don’t think highway advertising isn’t effective.

I’m not sure if the sign was new, but on the way up to Nebraska City, I noticed a small highway sign for the soda fountain at Stoner Drug in Hamburg, IA. While running behind and unable to stop, I left early on my return trip to make time for a brief detour into Hamburg to get a photo of Stoner Drug!

The picture was a hit on Facebook, prompting questions about whether they sold Doritos, why they don’t have grass in front, and wondering about expansion plans for the store (particularly into Colorado and Washington).

While the brand name is memorable, you have to wonder if it’s memorable in the best possible way, even though it is, I presume, a family name on the family business. Do you think Stoner Drug is a hard working brand name in a good way?

More Branding Decisions – Butt Burner Hot Sauce

Speaking of branding decisions, here’s another intriguing brand name for a sauce I spotted in the gift shop at the Arbor Day farm. While the packaging at least presents an idea of what type of butt is going to get burned, like Stoner Drug, this name too raises a whole array of others possibilities that make it a memorable name.

Both Trees and People Outgrow Roots

Roots are important for trees and people.

Roots that have been in place a long time can be both beneficial and detrimental. This tree demonstrates that. It appears to be taking its roots out of the ground as it grows. This seemed an appropriate metaphor for anyone who has been doing the same thing (whether personally or in a career) for a long time. If you have, it may be a good time to ask yourself if your roots are still providing a firm foundation or whether you may not be growing as much because your roots aren’t doing the job they used to do.

The Creative Value of Strategic Constraints

This sign by wood bridge on the way to the Arbor Day Farm gift shop provides a great real life example of the beneficial creative value of strategic constraints.

While it’s convenient to imagine that constraints crunch creativity, carefully chosen strategic constraints can be a significant instigator for creative thinking. In the case of this bridge’s construction, requiring that the natural surroundings not be disturbed, increased the construction challenge dramatically. It also increased the creativity as well, though. By removing the typical construction approaches for a bridge of this type, the designers and builders had to devise different ways to build the bridge that turned out to not only be less expensive but also protective of the woodland ecosystem.

E.T. and Friend

When we last checked in on the E.T. pipe sculpture at Bohl’s in Nebraska City, NE, he was all by himself. Now, he’s been joined by a Tom Servo-looking friend in the Bohl’s front window. I can’t wait to see what new sculptures will join these two in the future! - Mike Brown

Learn all about Mike Brown’s creative thinking and innovation presentations!

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Great to have Woody Bendle back this week with a new creative thinking exercise that, for those of you old enough to remember, will take you back to the 80′s while it also has you pointed toward future ideas! Here’s Woody . . .

 Creative Thinking Exercise – That’s Just the Way It Is

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones…” - John Maynard Keynes

I love this quote from Keynes.  In its brevity, it articulates two fundamental realities nearly every business faces.

1. Most organizations typically aren’t lacking for new ideas; and
2. The processes and procedures that helped to make organizations successful, are often the exact things preventing them from being innovative and finding that next level of new growth.

I have an idea…

Ideas are abundant – they really are. But good ideas worth backing are exceptionally rare.  By good idea, I mean a bona fide idea that can uniquely satisfy an important unmet or underserved consumer need.  And one that has the opportunity to create new consumer value in the marketplace.

Let’s face it, it feels awesome when you’ve come up with a really cool idea!  But, one of the most significant challenges every innovator faces is resisting the temptation to chase a cool idea rather than solving consumer needs.  This is a proven path to almost certain failure that we need not go down; but still so many do.

Innovation is a numbers game – just not in the way that many still think.  When 80%+ of all new products that launch each year fail, I would consider the current state of innovation a fundamentally broken numbers game.  Tossing the proverbial spaghetti against the wall is irresponsible; not to mention an incredible waste of time, effort and money.  There is however a better numbers game and that is generally regarded as the needs-first, or jobs-to-be-done approach to innovation.

By methodically and thoroughly understanding consumer needs and appropriately sizing up the market opportunity, you can flip the numbers from 80% failures to 80%+ successes. I don’t know about you but I like those numbers a whole lot better!

So, once you have identified the need(s) you wish to address, what do you do next?

Anyone got an idea?

Now is the time to come up with ideas.  Even though ideas can be abundant, coming up with well informed and focused ideas isn’t always easy.  Occasionally, you will be lucky and have one of those serendipitous eureka moments; but more times than not, it doesn’t work out this way.  Coming up with good new innovation ideas is hard work – really hard work.  And, thankfully hard work can often be made easier with creative thinking exercises.

One such creative thinking exercise I often like to use is one I call “That’s just the way it is” (cue Bruce Hornsby… now).

That’s Just the Way It Is, is pretty much what you might assume given the name.  This creative thinking exercise starts by identifying things are often regarded as standards, norms or expected protocols.  Many of you might have read (or at least remember the title from) Kriegel and Brandt’s 2008 book Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers” (affiliate link).

The “That’s Just the Way It Is” Creative Thinking Exercise

That’s Just the Way It Is essentially builds upon the notion of challenging existing conventions (and / or sacred cows) as a way to identity opportunities for innovation.

There are five steps to this creative thinking exercise:

1. Given the need(s) that you are attempting to innovate against, identify things (processes, procedures, designs, constructions, etc.) in your business or category that just are what they are.  These will be those things that are always done a certain way – and That’s Just the Way It Is.
2. List as many reasons as you can think of for why this is (or might be) the case.
3. List all of the ways (and reasons) the current state is good for your organization and all of the ways this is good for the consumer.
4. List all of the ways (and reasons) the current state might be limiting (and potentially even a negative) for your organization and your consumers.  And finally…
5. Take the thing you identified in step one and “go opposite.”  That is, what might it look like if you did the exact opposite (or reverse) of the thing you’ve identified.

Once you’ve completed steps 1-5 for the first thing came up with, keep going because this is where the real numbers game happens!

At this point in your idea generation phase, the more things you can identify that are Just the Way It Is, the better.  And more times than not, the things you come up with much later in this exercise are often the ones that have the best opportunity to be real game changers.

So what do you think? Is this a creative thinking exercise you can see adding to your creativity tool box?  Let me know!

Now, let’s get innovating! - Woody Bendle

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Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative thinking and ideas! For an organizational innovation success boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Working on developing a brand strategy for a client’s brand re-launch, we were brainstorming potential phrases for its brand promise and brand dimensions. We were starting with an extensive list of words we’d developed through a variety of brand-related strategic thinking exercises. While trying out word combinations to describe our client’s brand, we happened upon a new branding exercise.

Where Does Your Brand Live?

Here’s the scenario for this strategic thinking exercise:

Imagine your brand is relocating to an intersection in a new part of town where you get to select the names of the cross streets that will make up your brand address. With that freedom, what are the best names for the two streets where your brand lives?

As an example, we were at the seemingly ubiquitous Panera Bread for our meeting. You can imagine Panera Bread being located at the intersection of:

• Soups and Salads
• Meetings and Greetings
• Scones and Smoothies
• Drinks and Links (i.e., networking)
• Comfort Food and Uncomfortable Booths

Each of those intersections says something different about the Panera Brand brand – and that’s the point.

Don’t confine yourself to one set of cross streets. Imagine a whole variety of cross streets that could potentially be the current or, more importantly, the ideal address for your brand.

And once you have a long list of street name combinations, think about the possibilities relative to these questions:

• What others companies would be located near this intersection? Are they in your industry or other industries?
• What are the intersections where your competitors are located?
• How busy is your brand intersection?
• Is this intersection a prime location? Are property values around this intersection rising? Why or why not?
• Do people live in this area or do they just visit and leave?
• Why WOULD customers want to visit this intersection in this part of town?
• How likely is it that your intersection will, as other famous intersections have (think 12^th Street and Vine), be immortalized in a song?

The answers to all these questions should help you look at your brand and its strategic position relative to competitors and customers in a new and different way.

Strategic Thinking Exercises from the Brainzooming Lab

Most of the strategic thinking exercises we share have been well tested in client sessions.

This brand strategy exercise, however?

Well, we just came up with it last weekend! We’ll be trying this branding exercise out and welcome you to see how it works for you. If you take a shot at it, let us know how it works for helping clarify your new or existing brand strategy. - Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you are considering launching a strategic planning process, either for your organization overall or for a specific part of the business, you have obviously done some thinking about it to get to this decision point.

8 Questions to Ask Before a Strategic Planning Process

Simulated Image of a Brainzooming

Before taking your first steps to either implement the strategic planning process yourself or engage an outside party to lead you through the process, here are eight questions to ask.

Maybe you have already addressed some of these questions about your strategic planning process, but my guess is you likely have not tackled all of them:

• What benefits should we get organizationally from the PROCESS of strategic planning?
• Have previous strategic plans sat on the shelf or have we implemented them?
• Is there a type of strategic planning output that is not as likely to sit on the shelf?
• How many and what types of people should be involved?
• Should the strategic planning experience be serious, stimulating, exciting, rewarding, or fun . . . or is there another descriptor that is more appropriate?
• How fresh and reliable is our strategic foundation as we get ready to launch the strategic planning process?
• How big a change are we looking for in the new strategic plan – is it minor or are we taking a big swing at our future direction?
• How smart are we about what we do and our customers, markets, competitors, and all the other factors in our business environment?

Granted, these questions are shaped heavily by the very different approach The Brainzooming group takes to making sure a strategic plan broadly involves an organization and provides a dynamic, motivating, and creative experience for everyone involved.

Looking for Answers to these Strategy Questions?

However, based on talking with a variety of clients and potential clients, we approach strategic planning to create a very different experience than other outside strategists. So if you’d like help working through these questions and what they could mean for growing your organization and your people, give us a call (816-509-5320). – Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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A radio ad I used to hear all the time said, “The words you use matter.”

That is true for people, and it is especially true when you are figuring out how to brand a company. The brand language you strategically choose to describe what you do and how you do it sets the stage for both employees’ and customers’ expectations and satisfaction with your brand.

What types of brand language should you be using as you brand a company?

Seven Types of Brand Language You Should Use

As you develop (or refine) the brand language you are using, be on the lookout for each of these seven types of brand language to make sure you use words that are:

1. Simple

These are the easy to understand words that everyone knows and readily uses in your marketplace.

2. Emotional

The brand language that creates strong impact by tapping into an appropriate range of experience-based emotions.

3. Aspirational

Words that convey the hopes and dreams of employees, customers, and other stakeholders interacting with your company.

4. Unusual

Distinctive words whose less frequent use makes them stick out and become more memorable.

5. Connectable

These types of words readily pair up with other words, word parts, or phrases to create new and distinctive brand language.

6. Open

Brand language that brings depth to the brand because it can mean multiple things or apply in a variety of situations.

7. Twistable

Words you can use in varied ways and forms.

Pay Attention to Brand Language when Deciding How to Brand a Company

When devising your strategy for how to brand a company, don’t overlook the brand language. You can leave the selection of brand language to chance, accident, or time. Making solid brand strategy decisions on brand language, however, helps make sure the words you use not only matter, but also work as hard to benefit your brand as possible. - Mike Brown

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The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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