Fun, games and creativity
Posted by Jason Dunstone on July 26th, 2007 at 3:17pm
A fun office is one way to ensure staff happy and loyal. It seems that not only are they more satisfied, but fun produces creative thinking staff and with this an innovative enterprise. This is reported in an interesting article in the July 12 BRW. As the article states “playing games and having fun may seem a frivolous pursuit but many of Australia’s leading companies are encouring staff to ‘waste time’ as a means of creating new products and services”. This is interesting stuff for any organisation seeking innovation or consultancy supporting clients in this way.
Companies referred to as following the ‘fun in the workplace’ model include Cochlear [bionic ear] and Caltex. The article talks about innovation as the basis of many organisations and that even conservative organisations with such a mission need to have fun to be innovative.
Paul Carter the Innovation Manager of Cochlear refers to the ‘three I’s’ principal of innovation …
- Involvement
- Inspiration
- Implementation
This included finding out what customers want, how to develop this and commercialisation and actioning the idea. Rather than seeing the desire for innovation to be motivation to spend large sums of money with no focus, Cochlear has developed innovation games. This includes a range of innovation toys and games in the staff coffee area. They are not toys like those of some ad agencies but programmable robots, mind-stretching games etc.
There was a need for cultural change to ensure an innovative organisation is created. This needs support and endorsement from the top. Also important is the filtering of ideas to ensure they are actionable and worth further development. Some are measurement driven, while others believe measurement can destroy creativity.
Development of a ‘toolkit’ was seen as important to guide managers to lead the innovation process. The view from the article was that this requires training. This assists with the process of ‘ideas generation’ > ‘identification of good opportunities’ > ‘what will it take to make this work?’
Full article can be found at … BRW Ideas in Play
Posted in Imagination
