Creative Challenge

Perfumers who know and understand the fragrances of the major brands in a market are in a position to make acceptable traditional perfumes for that market. Any perfumer who wants to deviate from tradition and create successful innovative perfumes must know his or her market so intimately as to have acquired an intuitive feeling for its consumers olfactory frame of mind. Creating successful innovative perfumes for any market is the ultimate creative challenge. 

Creative Challenge helps you investigate the necessity, validity, and uniqueness of the current solution or approach. As such, this technique can be extremely helpful during the idea-generation phase of your innovation project—and can give you the impetus you need to discard your current solutions in favor of ones that are more ideal. 

Creative Challenge is not a rapid-fire brainstorming technique. Rather, it leverages a different approach called E/RJA ... 

You can follow-up Functional Analysis (Technique 13) with Creative Challenge to improve insufficient functions or eliminate undesirable ones. 

Scenario Credit cards are arguably easier to carry and safer to use than cash, but they can still be lost or used by unauthorized parties. As a result, credit card lenders have accumulated millions of dollars in fraudulent charges, and consumers are at great risk of identity theft. But what if credit card lenders challenged the status quo in search of a new, fraud-free method of payment Let s see how Creative Challenge could help them accomplish this job. 

You can creatively challenge any part of a process or system. Some hotels, for instance, now ask guests to reuse their towels rather than replacing them every day. The hotels did not challenge the entire maid service, just the part that uses excessive water and energy. 

Creative Challenge is never an attack or criticism, but a method that questions current thinking to discover new ideas and directions. 

Use a Creative Challenge matrix (Exhibit 15.2) to track your ideas and decisions for each item. 

This technique is particularly helpful when the group is in danger of domination by certain participants, or when team members may hold back because of the group makeup. However, if you re looking for more outside-the-box ideas, other ideation techniques may be more powerful, such as Provocation and Movement (Technique 22) or Creative Challenge (Technique 15). 

If you don t end up with enough viable ideas, create another imaginary statement by replacing a different element and go through the steps again. Or try another idea generation approach such as Creative Challenge (Technique 15) or Random Stimulus (Technique 21). 

Choose a focus topic—a product, service, process, or business model for which you need ideas. Make a list of the current features, characteristics, and aspects of the focus topic. To create the list, you can use brainstorming, or an approach like Creative Challenge (Technique 15). 

At age sixteen Woodward entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and raced through their chemistry studies in record time It took him three years to get his B.S. degree (in 1936), and only one to get his Ph.D. (in 1937). After a summer stint at the University of Illinois, Woodward joined the chemistry department at Harvard University, where, for the next forty-two years, he urged chemists worldwide to accept the creative challenges that organic synthesis had introduced. 

So, using the idea of incongruence, you might find It a creative challenge to see what would happen if you mixed game types with... 

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