Creativity is about making something new or turning chaos into order (as my friend @jted would say), whereas innovation is a process of renewed application for something that already exists. Innovation and creativity are, however, similar in the fear and uncertainty that belong to the ideation process. To quote the opening lines from the documentary Art & Copy:

“The frightening and most difficult thing about being what someone calls a ‘creative person’ is that you have absolutely no idea where any of your thoughts come from, and you have no idea where they’re going to come from tomorrow.”

Frankly, there are no magic beans for innovating products or systems. But there are a few ways to begin imagining how they could be taken into a different direction. Here are some to consider.

Swap

I cannot count how many times I’ve stared at a pattern on the floor, and had another one emerge – a smiling face, an animal of some kind. Once I know that it’s there, I can’t see the forest for the tree my brain has detected. And the reason I see it, is because I’m looking at the pattern from a different angle to everyone else.

Whether it’s a physical object, a concept or a tactic, reversing how you look at a problem will often lead you to something that has yet to be considered. Here, I cite the example of our recent Snack Pack Smile Facebook campaign. Originally, Snack Pack was going to donate a dollar on a user’s behalf to Food Banks Canada. This is a viable, expected way to send donations. However, we as a team imagined what it would be like to donate their dollar on behalf of someone from their friends list, and encourage them to do the same – “pay it forward,” as it were. This twist increased the virulence of our social share. The result: we hit our target of $20,000 to feed families in need before the end of the campaign.

Invent

In my humble childhood home, Allen’s apple juice was a staple. Though we couldn’t afford a can opener, we did have other tools – a shoe, for example, and a butter knife. I’d engineer the can open by placing the butter knife on the top of the can, and giving it a whack with the shoe. Prying the knife down created a perfect spout – even better than the one a can opener would create.

The key is to dismiss the expected applications of things. In 1945, Percy Spencer (an American engineer) was working on an active radar set when he noticed that the equipment was causing a chocolate bar in his pocket to melt. Though he was intending to use microwaves to improve communication, he ended up creating one of the most convenient – and most hated – kitchen appliances in modern society.

Simplify

Sometimes, innovation happens when you imagine how the component parts of something might be improved to optimize usefulness. When Earle Dickson (then a cotton buyer at the Johnson & Johnson company) noticed that his wife was prone to kitchen accidents, he imagined how he could make an adhesive bandage that would be sterile, and would stay in place. He perfected his BAND-AID® in 1920, and was awarded for his inventiveness by being named vice-president of the company. Dickson saw the component parts of a bandage: the adhesive piece and the cotton swab, and imagined how he could revise them for improved efficiency.

Play

Play isn’t just a verb, it’s an outlook. By choosing to have fun with your designs, copy, code or ingredients, you inherently change your approach.  Make word jumbles out of your copy. Turn your designs upside-down. Imagine seeing it as a 10-year old. When we make productivity a game we use a different part of our brain. Imagination, not obligation, takes over and we give ourselves permission to think a little more recklessly. The fork at our table is a hand, robot, post-apocalyptic pick-up truck. Fun paves the way to something new.

Consume

In “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell (one of my favorite authors) explains the massive role our subconscious plays in our decision-making. If our conscious mind had to make every decision we made, even the simplest of tasks would take hours to accomplish. While we are busy focusing on a task at hand, our subconscious is busy building a peripheral catalogue of everything around us. The next time we make a decision, our subconscious draws from our database of observations.

You can affect and alter how you make decisions by feeding your subconscious information. Books, movies, conversations, TV shows, video games, life experiences – all of these things will feed and shape your mind’s ability to think in different and deeper ways. Never give up the opportunity to experience something you haven’t before. It will pay dividends in almost everything you do, but especially when it comes to creativity and innovation.

Conclusion

There are many techniques and ways one can be innovative. These points are only a few of the myriad ways you can begin to try to approach problems differently. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you could innovate the tools of arriving at innovation.

“Dogfooding” is short hand for “eating your own dog food,” a term that is used by software companies to illustrate that they use as well as make their own software.

Microsoft and Google are probably the two most accessible examples of what this can mean for R&D. Microsoft became known for using their own Office product, a staple piece in almost every business and government workplace. Similarly, Google developers not only work on their core offering, but are also allotted a full 20% of their working hours to create pet projects, a brilliant idea that has lead to the creation of both Google News and Google’s social media platform Orkut.

It’s a proven model, so it should be no surprise that the developers at Grip also dine on our own kibble. When building the nomination site for the Oranges (Grip’s internal award program), the developers were able to integrate a different kind of authentication process and troubleshoot a solution for a nagging server issue. Most recently, Grip’s president, Harvey Carroll, moderated a battle of the business plans, allowing for voting via SMS and a mobile microsite with live voting results. At the end of this process, Harvey was able to use his phone to instantly name the winning team – as well as send a text alert to two random voters, informing them that they had also won prizes.

These are only a couple examples, but they lead to bigger conclusions. Here are a few other thoughts on how eating one’s own dog food can help improve overall product.

It forces developers and designers to be empathetic with their end user. It always scares me a little to hear designers question the validity of the user experience on their own projects. If the originator of the design can’t figure out how to perform a menial task how can we expect the end user to do so? It’s not enough to whip through an application to patch holes, you have to be a part of its active life.

You get user feedback for free and much quicker than you would in the wild. Consider how much faster it is to talk through an issue with a team member than a focus group. Going back to the Google example, you can see how that company uses its own resource pool to see if new features will work before spending money on promotion. They are a focus group – but of experts.

Finally, security of the project is increased. When you feed your dog food to a population with experience as vast as you do in an agency environment, unforeseen secondary uses rise to the surface. The combination of technical and non-technical people using your product reveals a gamut of interactions that may accidentally uncover a security flaw, before someone with less-than-ideal intentions gets to it.