2.1. Creativity and innovation

The recent years have seen a growing interest in the adoption of creative and innovation processes in enterprises. Creativity and innovation are perceived to be increasingly important means by which enterprises can distinguish themselves in marketplaces. The strategic importance of creativity has been acknowledged by many commentators, both at the international level – the Nomura Research Institute’s proposition is that creativity is the next economic activity, replacing the current focus on information – and within the UK, where the Cox review commissioned by Gordon Brown in 2005 saw exploitation of the nation’s creative skills as “vital to the UK’s long-term economic success” [COX 05]. The Cox review concluded that: “The success of the creative industries notwithstanding, there is evidence that UK business is not realizing the full potential of applying creativity more widely”. Other European nations have similarly identified the importance of creativity and innovation to their macroeconomic growth.

Having said that, although many organizations are seeking to adopt processes to support and adapt creativity and innovation processes, the differences and relationships between these phenomena are, on the whole, poorly understood. This chapter argues that, if we are to develop new processes, methods and tools to improve creativity in industrial innovation, these organizations need to better understand the relationship between creativity and innovation. Therefore, the chapter explores the role of design to deliver the results of creative thinking through to innovation in enterprise settings more effectively, and introduces a set of creativity techniques and design artifacts that can be embedded into service design work in order to support creative thinking more effectively.

2.2. Creative problem-solving methods

Creativity has been the subject of research in different disciplines for much longer than research in business and enterprise. The Greek philosophers considered the nature of creativity in human endeavor. In the late 19th Century, mathematician Henri Poincaré reflected on the nature of successful creative thinking in science [HAD 54]. Creativity research in its current form was developed during World War II in the U.S. military, and grew in the 1950s when Osborn and Parnes [OBS 53] and Synectics [GOR 60] developed new creative-solving processes. During the 1960s and 1970s, leaders such as Edward De Bono developed lateral thinking [DEB 07] and Genrich Altshuller evolved the theory of the resolution of invention-related tasks (TRIZ) method [ALT 99] for structured creative problem solving (CPS). More recent creativity research has been undertaken in disciplines including cognitive psychology [CSI 96], artificial intelligence [RIT 01] and product design [MOG 07]. The result, today, is a large and multidisciplinary body of knowledge of theories and models, and large collections of processes, techniques and tools for CPS. Many researchers would agree with the following prototypical definition of creativity:

the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive to task constraints) [STE 99].

Most of the use of creative processes and techniques to deliver new and useful outcomes in business and enterprise today is based on the CPS methods that were developed from the 1950s onward. The first of these was the CPS method of Osborn and Parnes [OBS 53]. This method was originally intended to help people understand and use their creative talent more effectively. It supports six stages of problem solving: objective finding, fact finding, problem finding, idea finding, solution finding and acceptance finding. The six stages are arranged into three groups – understanding the problem, idea generation and planning for action. Multiple versions of the method have been developed over the last half-century, and it has been successfully applied to resolve many problems creatively in business, enterprise and other domains.

Central to this CPS method is an open exploration or search for ideas to generate many novel and varied ideas and new perspectives, and then focus thinking by identifying ideas with interesting or exciting potential to refine, develop and put to use. The method primarily uses traditional forms of brainstorming and related creativity techniques in this divergent phase of CPS. The application of the CPS method to support creative thinking about, for example, the redesign of an urban bicycle hire scheme, leads to the generation of a large number of ideas and concepts, normally documented on post-it notes, which are sorted and prioritized. Although useful, a method to support the development of a large and complex service such as cycle hire needs other processes and artifacts, both to support divergent thinking about complex systems and to support convergent thinking to form and validate complex concepts, processes and systems.

2.3. Linking creativity and innovation through design

If creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate, innovation is generally accepted to be the process of translating these ideas into goods or services that generate value or for which customers will pay, or as Steve Jobs once called it, the creativity that ships. More recently, however, this view of innovation as translation from idea to good or service has been challenged, especially in the design world.

For example, the UK Design Council has defined design as the process that shapes creative ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users – creativity deployed to a specific end [DES 11].

The obvious interpretation of this definition is that design represents a critical intersection between creativity and innovation – that without design, creative ideas cannot be shaped to become the practical and attractive propositions that users need and want. These relationships are shown in Figure 2.1.

Evidence from reviews of many successful products and services tends to support this view. Many of the products and services that we consume and most people would consider to be creative are the result of substantial design processes – the iPhone, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the FIAT 500 automobile are all creative and innovative, but all have been designed to the nth degree. Indeed, it is difficult to think of many of today’s creative products and services that have not been designed in some form.

Therefore, one conclusion to draw from the Design Council’s definition of design, creativity and innovation is that enterprise solutions that are to innovate must be designed, with creative ideas as inputs to the design process. Increasingly, business and enterprise solutions must be subject to design processes.

2.4. Service design processes

Service design thinking is a human-centered innovation process that involves observation, collaboration, fast learning, the visualization of ideas, rapid prototyping and concurrent business analysis [LOC 10]. Although design thinking was originally developed to be applied to the design of consumer products such as iPods, shavers, lamps and chairs, and services such as hotel check-in and post office counters, it can also be applied to a wider range of design projects such as business processes for new staff appointments and unloading aircraft activities, and wider socio-technical solutions for air traffic control and awarding parking tickets.

Different definitions of service design have been offered, and most considered it to be an interdisciplinary activity. For example, Moritz in [STI 10] reported that it helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations … a new holistic, multi-disciplinary, integrative field. Livework, also in [STI 10], described service design as the application of established design process and skills to the development of services… a creative and practical way to improve existing services and innovate new ones. However, one of the most incisive definitions is from the service design studio 31 Volts in [STI 10], which describes it as when you have two coffee shops … selling the same coffee at the same price, service design is what makes you walk into one and not the other.

Moreover, Stickdorn and Schneider [STI 10] identified five principles of service design. These principles are:

1. 1) It is user-centered: services should be experienced through customer’s eyes using techniques such as observations and walkthroughs of a service from a customer’s perspective.
2. 2) It is co-creative: all stakeholders should be included in the creative process, and empowered to generate ideas, contribute to the designs and undertake creative work themselves. This principle assumes that all stakeholders have knowledge and experiences that can contribute to the design process.
3. 3) It sequences: services should be visualized as a sequence of interrelated actions using representations that are described later. The essence of a service is a sequence of activities – activities that take place before the service used, and end after the use of the service is complete.
4. 4) It is holistic: the entire environment of service should be considered. The wider context of the service – its physical, business and cultural environment – influences and is impacted by the design of the service, and needs to be considered.
5. 5) It evidences: intangible services should be visualized in terms of physical artifacts to enable them to be reasoned and communicated about.

Central to evidencing of a service is the notion of a touchpoint. Service consumers will interact with a service through a sequence of touchpoints. Moreover, the design of a service’s touchpoints and the relationships between these touchpoints provide the basic elements of service design represented with design artifacts, as is described later in this chapter.

Most of the services are implemented through touchpoints, which are different elements of a service that are used by its consumers. The touchpoints of a service should be designed to be harmonious with each other, and to deliver a more complete service experience to its consumers. Moreover, the touchpoints should convey the brand story to be communicated through the service. As such, service touchpoints can take multiple forms, and are not just the traditional interactive systems that we associate with a service. For example, touchpoints of the service that is offered by the London Underground include not only the trains, ticket machines and gates but also the staff uniforms, the fonts of the station names and the world-famous logo. Two examples of such touchpoints are shown in Figure 2.2.

In our experiences with creative service design processes, design specifications such as floor plans, wiring diagrams and floor layout specifications, and design artifacts such as sketches, storyboards and paper mock-ups have been critical to the success of these processes. Indeed, design artifacts fulfill a range of important roles in service design, and differentiate design from established CPS processes. For example, these design artifacts enable stakeholders to express their knowledge about the structure of services and touchpoints, in order to facilitate a longer, more continuous creative service design process. These artifacts also provide the service designers to externalize knowledge about the new service design and the creative ideas about it, to communicate this knowledge to others, and then to enable the validation, reflection and learning of this knowledge more effectively. And, of course, design artifacts enable design knowledge to be stored for reuse later and/or in other service design projects.

To this end, service design methods and techniques offer a range of established types of design artifact. Based on [STI 10], these include:

1. – Stakeholder maps: visual or physical representation of actors that are involved in service expressed using simple diagrams. Each map can be used to describe stakeholder’s interests and motivations, and links and relationships between these actors and stakeholders presented in visually engaging ways.
2. – Expectation maps: these chart user expectations of interactions with an existing service expressed visually to capture and describe these stakeholder’s emotions using media coverage. The maps can be used to capture emerging consumer higher level expectations. Expectation maps are often used for service diagnoses in order to discover areas needing attention.
3. – Desktop walkthroughs: these walkthroughs take place in small-scale three-dimensional (3D) models of the service environment built out of props, toys and other objects such as Lego bricks. These simple-to-use environments are used to act out service scenarios in the environment in order to explore emerging interactions. In particular, their physical nature encourages creative collaboration and play.
4. – Service role-play: service role-plays are interactive experiences that help stakeholders contribute to improving a service experience. Stakeholders enact different situations involving customer contact with the service. Different stakeholders fulfill different roles in turn to enact outline ideas generated using other creativity and design techniques. Role-playing service scenarios are particularly effective when observed by others as a source of new idea generation. Service role-plays are particularly effective for designing touchpoints and improving empathy with customers.
5. – Customer journey maps: a customer journey is a structured visualization of service user experiences that describe interactions with different touchpoints. Each visual map is a concrete description of touchpoints. The content of a map can include a customer’s own content to facilitate empathetic engagement, and analysis of them can be used to identify problem areas and opportunities.
6. – Storyboards: storyboards are graphic organizers – illustrations or images displayed in sequence to previsualize a motion graphic or interactive media sequence. Storyboards are frequently used to develop designs in film, theater, business and interactive media. Most present a sequence of events in visual form, and this accessible form helps to involve service consumers in the service design. Because storyboards describe the wider environment of a service, they contextualize the design of the service and each touchpoint.
7. – Design scenarios: a design scenario depicts one or more hypothetical stories, each of which details a service offering. A design scenario can be expressed in different forms, from plain text and sketches to videos, and any of these representations can be used to specify service touchpoints and interactions, and can be refined with personas representing the service consumers. Moreover, each scenario can be manipulated during walkthroughs as a positive or a negative scenario, for example how could things be made worse?
8. – Service prototypes: service prototypes enable the simulation of future services in order to facilitate learning by doing. The use of service prototypes exploits a behavior that is common to service consumers – to only be able to express what they want when they see or recognize it. As such, service prototypes are great for engaging consumers in the emerging service design. Service prototypes can take different forms, from informal role-play conversations to detailed full-scale creations with physical touchpoints. Our experience is to build prototypes for specific purposes.

Examples of some of these types of artifact applied to the redesign of an urban cycle hire scheme are shown in Figure 2.3. The left-hand image in Figure 2.3 shows a desktop walkthrough of urban cycle use in different city park settings and the right-hand image shows one storyboard of the future service design use.

In the author’s experiences, the development and use of these different types of artifact are pivotal to service design processes, and provide an important connection between earlier creative thinking and later innovation processes. For example, service prototypes from the design process can continue to be developed, deployed and refined continually through to innovation processes – translating the ideas embodied in each service or design prototype into goods or services that generate value or for which customers will pay. Returning to service design thinking as a human-centered innovation process that involves observation, collaboration, fast learning, the visualization of ideas, rapid prototyping and concurrent business analysis [LOC 10], we observe that there is less focus on creative thinking, which we perceive as a weakness that is discussed in the next section.

2.5. Integrating creativity support more effectively into service design methods

Service design’s early focus on observation, collaboration, idea visualization and rapid prototyping contradicts some established early creative thinking activities to collect, relate and, more importantly, to incubate. Indeed, the focus on the rapid development of visualizations and prototypes can impede incubation leading to transformational creativity that transforms the nature of the design problem and, hence, the service to be developed. Therefore, a challenge is to integrate more effectively creativity techniques into established service design processes.

One solution to overcome this challenge, which we have been experimenting within creative service design projects, is to couple selected creativity techniques with different types of design artifact. The coupling seeks to recommend design artifacts to use to both capture the results of creative thinking with the creativity technique, and to support further convergent creative thinking through the artifact as part of the design process. This coupling of technique-with-artifact is determined by an analysis of the mutual affordances of the technique and artifact. In the remainder of this chapter, these couplings are demonstrated by three pairings of creativity technique and design artifact that have been applied successfully in our design projects:

1. 1) constraint removal with design sketching;
2. 2) creativity triggers with desktop walkthroughs;
3. 3) idea combination rules with storyboards.

Each is described in turn.

Constraint removal is a transformational creativity technique in which a problem solver brainstorms possible constraints on a problem, and then removes one or more constraints in turn to generate a new, larger space in which new ideas are then generated. Constraints are descriptions that limit the space of possible ideas, and Onarheim [ONA 12] reports that constraints both constrain and foster creativity. Design domains are often overconstrained, for example in the design of office buildings, therefore most of the time constraints need to be relaxed. In contrast, many artistic domains often lack constraints, for example in poetry, thus artists often impose constraints to add artistic value to their work. There are four possible strategies for creative constraint handling: (1) black-boxing constraints, which treat constraints as unchangeable in order to focus effort on other constraints; (2) removing constraints, which ignores one or more constraints in order to trigger new constraints, whether this is possible or not; (3) revising constraints, which reinterprets one or more constraints expressed in a design brief and (4) introducing self-set constraints, in order to structure and focus into creative design process. After an open brainstorm to generate possible constraints, relevant constraints and the handling strategies are selected, and a brainstorm takes place in the enlarged ideas space generated for each constraint in order to create a wide range of new ideas that increase design ideas. We couple constraint removal with design sketching, a simple and flexible technique to depict and evolve the new ideas generated from the constraint removal. Design sketches are effective in early creative work because it is rough and quick, allowing new design ideas to evolve quickly. It allows the creative team to focus on the concepts rather than on fine-grained details of the design, which can be addressed later. It is inclusive and accessible, as most people can sketch with a minimum of training. And it is fun, encouraging play and the right types of emotion for creative thinking. Therefore, a design sketch captures and evolves ideas from constraint removal more effectively than simple post-it ideas, and each sketch brings a design artifact that can be shared in the creative design process.

Creativity triggers are an exploratory creativity technique that guides creative problem solvers to discover and generate new ideas with certain predefined qualities in an existing search space. Each trigger defines a simple rule with guidelines, and is often derived from expertise in problem domains that reveals common qualities or characteristics of creative ideas that are generated during convergence processes. Two creativity triggers are participation and convenience. The participation trigger is derived from observations that people want to participate more in processes and businesses, so the trigger directs the creative process to discover new ideas that result in greater participation in the new design. The convenience trigger is derived from observations that people want either convenience, or at least the perception of convenience. Hence, the trigger directs the creative process to either remove one or more steps from a stakeholder’s process, or to undertake one or more steps on behalf of the stakeholder. The typical outputs from the application of creativity triggers are more concrete, focused ideas that have some direct application to a design problem. Therefore, we couple creativity triggers with desktop walkthroughs, the artifact that takes place in small-scale 3D models of the service environment built out of props, toys and other objects. These simple-to-use environments are used to act out service scenarios in the environment in order to explore emerging interactions based on the concrete design ideas often generated from creativity triggers.

Finally, an idea combination rule is an instance of a combinational creativity technique that provides explicit rules that, when applied, find new ideas by combining two or more ideas already found in the space. It assumes that a search space has already been examined in order to discover new ideas, but further ideas can be generated from informed combinations of these ideas. Idea combination rules direct the creative problem solver to discover these new, informed idea combinations. Examples of these rules include combine two unconnected touchpoints, deliver known service with new types of touchpoint, apply known service to new information, and combine two actors into a single role. We combine idea combination rules with the storyboard design artifact to support more effective combinational creativity. Storyboards organize illustrations or images that are displayed in sequence to previsualize a motion graphic or interactive media sequence – these structures provide an effective mechanism by which to report, combine and share the results of combinational creativity.

Moreover, studies of how designers used design artefacts during creative design projects revealed other affordances and benefits of shared artefacts in early creative design processes. For example, in the EU-funded COLLAGE project¹, studies of design behavior revealed strong evidence of social flow during the production of shared artifacts in convergent creative processes to achieve a clear goal. This observed social flow with artifact use contrasted with the relative lack of evidence of flow during the earlier divergent search activities, during which individual participants often worked separately, in different ways, with different tools, to achieve different goals, and the participants did not demonstrate much evidence of social flow. Furthermore, the empirical evidence revealed that individual and group creative thinking, which generated new knowledge during periods of social flow, happened at different times in the process to the learning about this new knowledge. Moreover, the shared artifacts fulfilled an important role in representing knowledge so that it could be learned. We observed cycles of:

1. 1) social flow, in which participants in the creative process collaborated to generate new knowledge, often in the form of a shared artifact;
2. 2) then, once the social flow had ceased, longer periods of reflective learning in which the same participants reviewed the shared artifact, sought to make sense of it, critiqued it, and learned new knowledge from it.

This observed relationship between creative thinking and reflective learning is not new. For example, the EU-funded FP7 Mirror Project developed an integrated model of creative thinking and reflective learning that was applied to individual and social creativity in different sectors². Results from the COLLAGE project are consistent with this model; therefore, we propose to extend its model of social creativity and learning with elements of the Mirror descriptive model of computer-supported reflective learning. The model was developed from existing models of reflective learning (e.g. [SCH 83, BOU 85] and [LAV 93]) to be a reference model with which to develop computerized support for individuals, teams and organizations. Not all of the discrete activities described in the model need to be present in all instances of reflective learning. For example, during reflection-in-action during work, there might not be a conscious decision to reflect, and the framing of reflection might be brief. Furthermore, although the activities are expected to take place in a broad sequence, some activities can be concurrent and repeated.

2.6 Conclusions

This chapter has reported on the important role of creativity to innovation, and highlighted the role of design as the discipline and the activity by which to deliver innovations from the results of creative thinking. It has summarized recent advances in design thinking principles and processes, and draws on this chapter author’s own experiences with creative design processes to make recommendations about the use of creativity techniques and design artifacts to enable more effective design innovation. It adopts the UK Design Council definition of design as the process that shapes creative ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users – that design is creativity deployed to a specific end [DES 11]. The implication is that enterprises that seek to innovate need to ensure that not only do these enterprises have effective processes, climates and organizational structures to support creative thinking, but also these organizations need to have adopted design processes sufficient to deliver innovations from the outcomes of these creative processes. The emergence of the design thinking and service design disciplines provides a set of processes, techniques and tools to deliver potential innovations from the results of creative thinking, but only if the enterprise’s creative and design thinking processes are sufficiently integrated.