PHOENIX -- Tom Wujec, author of two books on innovation and ideas and fellow and principal consultant of digital-design software company Autodesk, wowed his c-store industry audience Tuesday at the Convenience Retailing Conference 2007 with images and suggestions on how to better imagine and innovate.
Through examples from his experience with designing with and for the latest technologies, Wujec revealed insights into how people think and what they need to do it better.
He used as an example a design challenge given to all ages and walks of life [image-nocss] in which kindergartners did bestbetter than engineers, executives, teachers, in short, better than grown-ups. The challenge was to build, in groups of four and in 15 minutes, the tallest freestanding structure from 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of tape, one piece of string and one marshmallow. The reason the kids did best was, according to Wujec, because they didn't care about "being the CEO of Spaghetti Inc." Their indifference to power freed them to imagine and build.
That freedom was one of the ingredients Wujec cited in fostering imagination; the others included time and conversation. Hindering imagination is fear, stress and conflict. Operating in silos is not something to be proud of, he said; rather, better to get everyone involved with a project into one room.
Wujec showed that Unilever cut its product development time to two weeks from eight months by, among other changes, tracking the levels of unhappiness in the development groups during the process. There is tension until a shared vision is reached, followed by a decrease in unhappiness and an increase in what he called "flow," best compared to being in a zone of imagination and creativity.
Wujec said for flow to be maximized, and therefore for innovation to be fostered, there must be clear goals, plenty of feedback, challenges that test skills and uninterrupted concentration. Since we live in a time of information overload, with pressures from the economy, society, technology and information, and with time and space being compressed, Wujec said, "There is no mass market anymore."
He left the audience in the WigWam Ballroom with this: "What if convenience retailing coordinated its innovation?"
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