Tuck Knowledge in Practice Podcast: How to Be Creative

[Media Clips]: No wonder she's pleased with her washing machine. It's an English electric wash and rinse. The wash and rinse gets your clothes beautifully clean without tangling to boil if you want. And then. And this is where it really scores. It does your rinsing for you too. Just think how fresh that leaves your clothes. So choose the washing machine that rinses for you too. The English Electric wash and rinse.

[Podcast introduction and music]

Kirk Kardashian: Hey, this is Kirk Kardashian and you're listening to Knowledge and Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In this podcast, we talk with tuck professors about their research and teaching and the story behind their curiosity. Today on the podcast, we have veteran marketing professor Peter Golder who's going to tell us about his new elective course, Creating Winning New Products and Services. During this episode, we will not only learn about the five-stage process for creating a new product, but we'll also hear about the one thing that all new products have in common. Hint they're not completely new. And we'll also learn some mental exercises that can help us be more creative. Tuck students are fortunate to have Peter Golder teaching this course because he literally wrote the book on this topic. I'm talking about his 2018 Handbook of Research on New Product Development. But aside from that, Peter is professor of marketing at tuck and his research on market entry, timing, new products, long term market leadership and quality has won more than ten Best Paper or Best Book awards, including several of the most prestigious awards in the field. He is the co-author of the book Will and Vision How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets. And his research has been featured in numerous mass media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist and advertising age. To start off, I want to read an excerpt from your syllabus that succinctly describes what this course is all about. So here it goes. Quote. This course teaches a process for identifying market opportunities, creating new product or service ideas, and turning those ideas into valuable new products and services. We focus on the tools and techniques for analyzing market opportunities, creating creative thinking for generating new ideas, and then designing, testing, and launching new products and services. So before we dive into the specifics of your course, can you talk a little about the importance of developing new products and services, both for firms and the economy in general?

Peter Golder: So new products—I mean, it's been my area of research for a long time. It's super fun to study because it basically transforms the way we live our lives on a daily basis. So you go back to the things people have in the households, just like washing machines and dishwashers are transformative, especially like a washing machine. I mean, it transformed the life of the household. I remember talking to my grandmother, who grew up in her home, before she had had a washing machine and what that was like. So, really transformative in her life as we think forward to more recent innovations, of course, our mobile phones have transformed life in a large way. But over time, things like radios and TVs and satellites and all these things really transformed the way we go about our daily lives. I think most people would say for the better not without some unintended consequences, perhaps, but these new products really change the way we live our lives on a daily basis and raise standard of living for people, for companies. They help companies grow. Help companies be more profitable. And for individuals it's a nice path for them to just to explore these new opportunities and ends up as a way that successful entrepreneurs become rich in the process.

Kirk Kardashian: New products are always exciting for consumers. I know that everyone's looking forward to something new that's going to come out. Oftentimes we'll find things that we didn't know we needed, right. And those tend to be sometimes some of the best things.

Peter Golder: Right? Sure. So I know you ride bikes a fair amount. So think back from going from a steel frame to aluminum frame to carbon frame and what's that? What's that mean? Just for biking. And aside from all the other technology that goes along with it, when you think back to like 150 years ago, people riding on a bike and like this giant front wheel and a tiny back wheel and it's hard to imagine that that would be like bicycle technology. And how much just that has changed over time in every, every aspect of it has it has really changed over time from the materials to the braking technology and the gears and all those things have changed. So even within the context of a bicycle as a category, it's changed tremendously over time.

Kirk Kardashian: So in that excerpt of your syllabus that I read I noticed that you italicized and underlined the word process. So clearly that's an important word in this context. Why did you decide to teach this material of this course through the vehicle of a process?

Peter Golder: The process is important to me because I want to break this notion of innovation being considered just a matter of luck. Therefore, a process is something that you can replicate. And once you learn it in one context, which is what we do in the course we apply to apply it in one context within the course. Then you can replicate this in other aspects of your life. And really this this process has been in, , in place for decades. I would say people get better at parts of it, but the process is going to be able to stick with the students for the rest of their lives.

Kirk Kardashian: Can you pick a popular product or service and tell us how it came to be?

Peter Golder: So one of the things we think about a lot today would be our mobile phones, our cell phones, of course. So part of the history with that, that I've talked about in my research, is as a concept, people knew about communication technologies for a long time. So before telephone there was telegraph and there were other ways to communicate at a distance before that. So that kind of technology goes back to the early parts of the of the 1800s. Then, of course, you have the telephone in the latter part of that century. And it wasn't just Alexander Graham Bell who was involved in that, in that development. But then when you think about mobile phones in particular. So mobile phones really kind of started to leverage like radio technology to be able to communicate at distance. So you'd have things like people would have car phones, but they'd have car phones that would be using radio frequencies instead of cell technology. So some of the early concepts for mobile phones, Bell Labs, was doing this in the 1940s. There were patents on cellular technology. So cellular technology is still using the radio waves, but you're breaking up into discrete cells, which allows kind of the same frequency to be used by more than one, more than one call by multiple calls. So you have patents developed around that in the 70s. You have prototypes in the 60s. And basically, when this finally hits consumers kind of in the 80s when sort of B cell licenses start to be distributed in the early 80s. This technology has really been around in some form for decades.

Peter Golder: And so consumers are really seeing this at the tail end of a of a very long process. And of course those were just the early cell phones. Those are the bricks that we see on the TV shows from the 1980s that people have to hold with two hands. But, where does the technology go from there? Part of that I can trace through things like the MP3 players, right where you start to develop things that are not the phone, but you're still developing things like—you're seeing manifestations of file compression technology that come through MP3 players, but then that file compression technology can be traced back to the 40s with some of the original ideas, 50s, 60s, 70s with some of the early, early parts of that. So file compression didn't start with the first Apple iPod that comes out. That idea is out there for a long time. And as you move forward towards the iPhone, what's unique about the iPhone? In a lot of ways, the iPhone combined technologies that existed for a while. But obviously did it in a very elegant way. But the underlying technologies, like a file compression that went into some of it, had been around for a long time. Even things like touch screens had been around for a long time. I don't know about you—the first touch screen I used was in around 1988.

Kirk Kardashian: Really? Wow. That's early.

Peter Golder: But then that technology existed before. So this idea that the touch screen wasn't invented with the iPhone, it had been around in forms before that. And even Steve Jobs himself would say that. Creativity is a lot about connecting things. And he's not the only person to say that. But many people have thought that. So especially for these commercialized technologies, a lot of it is about taking ideas that have existed in some form and putting them together. Tim Berners-Lee, the person associated with the advent of World Wide Web, also talks a lot about that—about pulling different technologies together and putting them into something that is really unique when you put them all together. But you're not starting from scratch. You're really building on the work of others. So I think for entrepreneurs, it's important to think about sort of what already exists in the marketplace. And the opportunity to be successful with a radical innovation means that you're not creating something brand new. You're probably putting pieces together that have existed for a long time in a way that that no one has really done before. Another example is fundamental technologies like lasers.

Peter Golder: Lasers were invented in the lab, but then found their way into all variety of different technologies. So just like CD players would be one of these. And so you think like the laser wasn't invented to develop a CD player necessarily, but that technology eventually found its way into that format. Sometimes you see these innovations come along because there is a technology that can meet an underlying need. So a lot of radical innovations really center around figuring out better ways to transport us automobiles, airplanes, jet engines, things like that. A lot of radical innovations center around helping people communicate better, going from shouting at a distance to telegraph to telephone to mobile phones, things like that, or entertainment. And so you think about radio to TV as a form of not just communication, but entertainment. Movies, talking movies at one point. Technology has developed through that. So they're basically satisfying an underlying need that exists for a long time. But you're just using technology to do that in better and better ways. And one of the things, again, going back to like our mobile phones, you’re really kind of merging the communication need and the entertainment need and packaging that in one device.

Kirk Kardashian: So let's take the reality of that process and think about it in, in the context of your course. Then how do you convey that and teach that to your students?

Peter Golder: It comes down to this process again. So there is this process and this is a process that's not unique to me. Essentially the five-stage process is: you identify an opportunity and that space can be fairly broad. Second stage is you generate ideas. Generally you're trying to generate a lot of ideas. I'm a big proponent of: you're going to find the diamond through a lot of a lot of carbon dust along with it. And not just that. It's not that you're going to find one good idea, 99 bad ideas. But those bad ideas are often the stepping stones to a good idea, where you take pieces of those bad ideas that help you. You can incorporate some aspects of those. So volume is really good at the idea generation stage. Then you move on to concept development or prototype and then your market launch in the fifth stage. So those are the five stages. And it's really important too for the students to understand that process. But then get into the details of each part of that process as well during the course.

Kirk Kardashian: I thought it would be fun to focus on one aspect of your course, which is the creative process for people who don't think a lot about creativity. The act of being creative seems like something that just springs forth from our minds, and there's not much rhyme or reason to it. But one of your class sessions is called Creative Thinking Techniques for Idea Generation. So there must be some specific ways to foster creativity, which I think is so interesting. Can you tell us about some of these ways that you like to think about creativity and how to foster it?

Peter Golder: It's one of the fun parts of the course, really. I mean, there are lots of fun parts of the course, but this is one of them. And, um, it does sort of surprise people to think of creativity as a process rather than just, again, this kind of lucky outcome that, that that happens. But essentially, to think about this conceptually, where I think about this is you really want to think about how to move your thought to unexpected places.a lot of people are sort of hardwired to think in more linear processes. That's typically how we're efficient, right? So throughout our lives we get paid to be efficient at something. And we talk about learning curves. And essentially, learning how to do to do more in the same amount of time or just do things faster. But creativity is not designed for efficiency. So we're not necessarily good at it, but you want to take the thought and move it kind of kind of sideways rather than move it forward, because that helps you kind of explore a different space. So what are some ways to move your thought sideways? One of the kind of more intuitive ways to grasp is just using a random word or random object association. So if you take a bunch of random objects, take a random object, any random object—that there's a fan sitting over there—and then you think about all of the attributes of that fan; both how it looks, how it performs, all the sort of characteristics of that.

Peter Golder: And then you can take all those characteristics and you map those back to your focal area. So you think, I want to innovate in this space that has something to do with a new form of communication or something, and you say, what does a fan have to do with communication? Perhaps nothing. But if you come up with 100 associations for a fan, just in terms of the parts that it's made of, where it operates, when it operates, the basic things that it does. So you come up with these 100 associations, and then you have all these random associations to do with a fan. So it's not just about mapping a fan, but it's these 100 other things that you associate with a fan back to this focal area where you're trying to innovate. And essentially your thought is moving—your thought is moving sideways in that way and without a particular destination in mind. But that's what you're trying to do with, with creativity. So that random object is one thing. Another thing is to think about the assumptions that exist in industries.

Peter Golder: So every industry is built on a certain set of assumptions, and one of the ways you can be innovative in industry is to take those assumptions and then either remove those assumptions or reverse those assumptions. Some examples of this would be if you think about this in transportation. So again, I'm going back to transportation as one of the core areas of invention. And you think about how people use short term transportation. You think about a classic rental car situation. So what do you do in a rental car? What are the norms in a traditional rental car? I mean, it's gotten more automated over time, but traditional rental car, you go to the store, you go to the rental, , office, you stand in line, you fill out some paperwork, and finally they give you your car. If we take those assumptions of the industry, what happens if we take away those assumptions? And what happens if I don't have to go to the office and I don't have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and then something like that becomes manifested in something like Zipcar, where the car is essentially there for you, and the technology kind of takes care of all those other parts. Now you think about that.

Peter Golder: So Zipcar was reasonably successful, I would say as an operation; certainly as an entrepreneurial venture. It made some people wealthy. But to think about transportation again and you think about things like taxis. So what are all the assumptions in taxis? Right? I have to go find the taxi. I typically am going to have to pay in cash. And you think about all the assumptions that go along with that, and then you start to take away some of those assumptions. I mean, everyone knows now I'm talking about Uber and Lyft and services like that. And those aren't the only ride services out there. But certainly in terms of being financially successful and really kind of transforming the way a lot of people live. I mean, you're basically just taking these assumptions that everyone else took for granted and saying, we're going to remove these. Yeah. And then you figure out a way to remove them. But the first thing is to break the idea is to break this notion that we have to accept these as just the way things work. Yeah. And when you break those assumptions, you don't necessarily know how you're going to fix them, but at least starts you on a path then to fixing them.

Kirk Kardashian: Right, right. No, that's really interesting because it makes me think about the sort of the research process that you undertake a lot, which is questioning conventional wisdom. Right? I mean, a lot of your research has been looking back on research that has been done and saying, maybe that's not the way it really worked. Right. And so that must kind of have some synergies with you in this in this course and thinking about new products. Does it also kind of connect with how you do research?

Peter Golder: It does. This idea of reversal is important because, I think about my research, there's two main ways it goes. One is taking a bunch of phenomena that are unstructured and trying to put some structure around it. The other way is more the one that you're suggesting. The other approach I've used is to look at things that people do accept as being somewhat conventional wisdom and and then looking into those and, I mean, I almost ask myself at the beginning, what if this wasn't true? And then sometimes when you look at it closer, it turns out, yeah, it's not so true. So this is related to the first mover literature that you're referring to, which was pretty much accepted as conventional wisdom that first movers are successful. And it turns out that that they're not; it's just the surviving first movers are—can be reasonably successful, but a lot of them fail before you got to the survivors. And we go back to this innovation path. I mean the people who were selling fax machines in the 1860s were not becoming the next Bell Telephone Company. Although, Western, I've been more on the telegraph side, Western Union, certainly, established itself pretty well for a long time in that business. The early people selling auto navigation systems in the early 1900s didn't create a financial empire. But that sense that it just takes a long time really wasn't that well documented in the literature either. So yeah, it's fun to dig into the history of innovation and come up with something that people really haven't thought about as much before.

Kirk Kardashian But when you're talking about the assumptions that you kind of want to take away in this, in this creative process, I couldn't help but think that those assumptions were also kind of inconvenient things about the product that needed to be changed or that should have been changed? Is that sort of just a coincidence, or do you think that's part of the process—that the assumption is also a problem?

Peter Golder: It can be a problem. And certainly, solving in a different way can create some benefit. So, another example of this would be like Netflix or at least Netflix in its first form really removed some conventions, right? Because I don't know about you, but, I mean, I went to Blockbuster, the local video store. That was normal, right? You would go, they'd have a limited selection, but you would go and pick something that was on the shelf. But what are the assumptions there? The  assumption is that the customer is going to go to the store and selection is going to be limited. You're going to pick the best available. And Netflix really reversed those and is saying essentially, again this is still Netflix kind of the early version, the mail version. But the store came to you instead of you go to the store and the selection was pretty unlimited. Your questions really gave me this idea also of like pain points, which is another way to think about innovation. It's a little more of a straightforward route to innovation, I would say. But they often are related because an assumption is really often a suboptimal solution. And even if it's not an explicit pain point, accepting that assumption is usually leading to some type of suboptimization, and relaxing that assumption at least gets you to the possibility where you can move someplace else.

Kirk Kardashian: And again, this is mentally move someplace else. And you're imagining the world in a different way and then figuring out if you can actually create that. And part of this creative thinking, it's not necessarily going to lead the next billion dollar company, but you can at least imagine a world where it might be possible. And then you think about, well, is their technology really to make this happen? Because those two have to go together. Because Netflix, especially the later version, the more streaming version of Netflix, needed some technology. Uber needed some underlying technology. A really meaningful auto navigation system is a lot better with GPS than figuring out just going through inertia and trying to figure out how the car is moving mechanically to try and figure out where it is. So the technology definitely underlies this, but by reversing these assumptions, you can at least get yourself to a place where you can think, well, what's possible now? And is this possible?

Kirk Kardashian: So under the under the heading of creative process, you have the students do an individual project where they choose a creative genius to study. So tell us a creative genius that you admire and how you organize your own creative process.

Peter Golder: Yeah, there are many, many answers to that question. I think one that comes to mind now is just Leonardo da Vinci. And the reason why I would pick him is because he was really involved in so many different aspects of kind of innovation and creative thinking. And from art just to science. And I think that the reason that's important to me is one of the things I talk about in the class and is, is just kind of different ways of thinking and different styles of thinking and how we shouldn't limit ourselves in terms of how we think, even if we have tendencies to think in certain ways that we can develop other skills. So just like creativity, I make sports analogies in class, right? So if you're right-handed, you're still going to work on your left in practice. Right? You want that left hand to dribble to be just as good as the right handed dribble. In terms of thinking, I'm a big believer that we have kind of natural ways of thinking, but that we can develop all the different ways of thinking. And I think Da Vinci is a good example of somebody who really developed a variety of ways of thinking and put those into practice. And I think that's good inspiration for all of us to think about how we can not only build on our strengths, but develop those aspects that maybe aren't as much of our natural tendencies. And this gets back to something we were talking about earlier: creativity and innovation coming through, connecting different things.

Peter Golder: And the more ways that we think differently, the better we are able to do that as individuals, to connect the artistic side of what we're doing, the literature side of what we're doing to the technology or science side of what we're doing. So I think as individuals, we can do that to develop ourselves, to fulfill our own potential. But then you also asked about the group part of the project, and this is where the group part comes in. And one way is to do this in innovation project is to is to do this in groups. Because one of the consistent findings in the research literature is that diverse new product teams outperform less diverse new product teams. And it's the reason diversity works in most environments is because we learn more from people with different points of view from us. And that's true in many contexts. I would say for me, I would say all contexts. But there's a lot of research in the innovation literature that really shows these diverse new product teams work because not only are individuals sort of bringing their whole selves to a project, but people with diverse points of view are bringing their whole selves. And it really links to this overall creative idea, because as a group, they're able to move to different mental spaces than any one person would move on their own, and they can bring the group with them over to that mental space, and another person can bring them to another mental space. And essentially you put these different ideas and you make these connections in a way that an individual person would not do as successfully as a diverse team.

Kirk Kardashian: I really want to hear your own creative habits, your creative process.

Speaker3: So I think about this reversal idea, this sense of provocation about testing ideas and thinking about the opposite of something and that can lead to—it's not going to be fruitful every time you take that path. More times, more often than not, it's going to be a dead end. But the times when it's not is pretty exciting because you're finding something new and essentially reversing conventional wisdom. So that is pretty exciting to be able to do that. And it's worth the dead ends because you figure out the dead ends pretty, pretty quickly. And you invest in the paths that actually have some successful outcomes. I also think it's important to think about sort of what activities or times of day are important for thinking. So, for me, things like running, bicycling would be good chances to think, because I think my thought process there is a little bit less structured because the thought can kind of go in different places, and you're sort of thinking about one thing that happened last week, and then all of a sudden there's this thing you see off over here.

Peter Golder: So your thought is kind of moving in a more fluid way when you're in an activity like that. For me personally, I do enjoy thinking at those times. I also find I do a lot of good thinking early in the morning, like when I wake up. Maybe this is just my excuse for staying in bed, but sometimes if I'm on a good path, I will stay there and keep thinking. And I've mentally written papers during that time, and I think that's a time where I feel like my thoughts can be moving in different spaces at that point. I'm able to kind of pull things together, but that thought of mental exploration is really important. It's one of the things I like about the course; one of the things I like about being able to do research and, seeing the students kind of put their thoughts and energies into different, different spaces and coming up with new ideas is very exciting to be able to participate in that process with them.

Kirk Kardashian: I wanted to go back for a second to what you were saying about DaVinci and how he kind of brings these different ways of thinking together and brings them to bear on his creations. It reminds me of that early Apple slogan, think different, right? When I think about thinking differently, I'm like, well, what does that mean to think differently? Because I think the way I think, and I don't know another way to think. Right? Like what? What are some ways we can think differently from our usual thought patterns? Is there is there a way you can talk about that? 

Peter Golder: I definitely think there are things we talk about. So we touched on earlier this idea of just identifying norms and assumptions in the industry and really just either taking those away. So you either remove those or you or you reverse those. There's another technique we talk about in class that's just about the idea of substituting or enlarging or adapting. You think about innovation in, this isn't the greatest form of innovation, perhaps, but do you think about Oreo cookies, right? So for many decades, an Oreo cookie was an Oreo cookie. And basically starting, I think it was like in the 1970s when they started with like Double Stuf. They essentially started an innovation strategy that they continue to use today, which is basically either you make the cookie or the filling, greater or lesser, you change the flavoring. So basically, they're like adapting, modifying, enlarging, shrinking different aspects of it. And that's been kind of their innovation strategy for a long time. So there are things like that that just kind of get you to move in a different direction. But I do think these things that have to do with reversing, taking away assumptions, reversing conventional norms and just allowing the thought to go there. It's not going to get you to someplace all the time.

Peter Golder: It's going to get you someplace, not necessarily someplace useful, which is the other thing about innovation. There's creativity, there's innovation. Innovation has to be sort both creative and useful, I think. The creativity part of it is a necessary part of it. So you can't have innovation without some measure of creativity. And it's okay to have a lot of a lot of failures in that creative part of the process to get to the successful parts of it. The other thing we talked about was making connections, and this is something you can do in daily life, just walking around a store or taking a walk in the neighborhood: You can pick any two random objects and think about how those two objects are connected, right? Like how is that pen connected to that microphone? You say, ah, they're not really connected. Or you could spend the next ten minutes thinking about the 100 ways that they're connected.

Peter Golder: And you could come up with 100 ways in which in which they're connected. And so the idea of connecting things is a skill that can work more generally. But I do think all these all these steps of both reversing things, escaping just this idea of like wishful, wishful thinking can be important. I think DaVinci had a lot of wishful thinking, right? Who's thinking about, like, flying vehicles and stuff like that? But still, you see a bird. How many millennia ago did the first person see a bird and say, wouldn't it be cool if I could fly? That's wishful thinking. And it doesn't develop into the Wright Brothers overnight. But I mean, you can have that idea long before you have the technology that can that can fulfill that idea. So I think, just this idea of wishful thinking, canceling, negating, denying, removing assumptions, reversing assumptions and industry norms. These are all things that move us to different places that we wouldn't get if we just went with a more sort of linear way of thinking.

Kirk Kardashian Yeah. Wow. Well, I'm going to walk around now with this whole new sense of the world. So thank you, Peter.

Peter Golder: My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kirk Kardashian: No. It's been great to talk with you. It's been a fascinating conversation. And I think our listeners are really going to enjoy thinking more about their creative process. So thanks again. 

Kirk Kardashian I'd like to thank my guest, Peter Golder. You have been listening to Knowledge in Practice, a podcast from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Please like and subscribe to the show. And if you enjoyed it, then please write a review as it helps people find the show. This show was recorded by me, Kirk Kardashian. It was produced and sound design by Tom Whalley. See you next time.

[podcast outro and music]

Speaker4: Yo, T-Bone, did you produce this?

Speaker5: Sounds good. Right?