Logical Creative Thinking Methods

Min Ding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Prise de décision

Using a new, systematic framework, this illuminating book turns ideation into a task anybody with sound logic and a determination to learn can do, and do well, by separating the process from the outcome.

In a competitive marketplace, all firms must constantly innovate to create sustained shareholder value. The main roadblock in innovation is ideation: the identification of value-creating ideas, often seen as the work of innately creative people. This first-of-its-kind textbook demonstrates that anyone can ideate through specific logical processes that require no creativity when used, but generate valuable and creative outcomes. To help students master and apply these methods, the book is filled with innovation examples across many sectors that can be explained and recreated using a specific LCT method. The book also includes exercises that enable readers to practice applying each method to solve real life innovation challenges.

Upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students of innovation, creativity, and new product development will appreciate the demystification of ideation into a problem that can be solved by applying a series of rigorous, defined methods that can be followed without ambiguity.

PART 1

Foundation

This section is the foundation of this book. Chapter 1 introduces the Logical Creative Thinking (LCT) paradigm, followed by two chapters describing the LCT doctrines that define the characteristics of innovators/inventors, which are called explorers (Chapter 2), and the innovation process, which is called search (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 describes the general process for using LCT methods in practice, and Chapter 5 summarizes the LCT methods that are described in detail throughout the book. Finally, Chapter 6 describes the preparatory work required before LCT methods are employed.

1

Introduction

This chapter provides a concise introduction to the book. It covers the origin of innovation and introduces the fundamental perspective that innovation should be treated as a scientific discipline. Logical Creative Thinking (LCT) is defined and application domains for LCT methods are identified. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the relationship between LCT and other innovation tools.

The Origins of Innovation

In the universe in which we live, the very first innovation (at the atomic level) was the creation of hydrogen atoms approximately 377,000 years after the Big Bang, which is estimated to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Heavier atoms (up to and including iron) have been created in stars since 400 million years after the Big Bang (approximately 13.4 billion years ago), and even heavier atoms (such as gold and silver) are created when massive stars reach the end of their life cycles and explode. This has created a set of 94 atomic elements that occur naturally. All physical matter that we observe today, including the human body, is formed by combining atoms from this small set of elements.

Fast-forwarding to the Early Stone Age, approximately 2.6 million years ago, the first human innovation was the stone tool set; by refining the edges of large, sharp stone flakes, humans were able to create very efficient cutting tools. This type of tool was used, with some modifications, until the Middle Stone Age (which began approximately 300,000 years ago and ended approximately 50,000 years ago). During this period, humans fashioned sharp stone or bone projectiles and attached them to spears or darts to catch fast-moving animals such as birds and dangerous animals such as mammoths. Other fine stone tools such as those used for fishing were also developed during this period. During the Late Stone Age, which ended a few thousand years ago, humans began to develop much more sophisticated tools, including bone and ivory needles to sew closely fitted garments for warmth, pottery for cooking and storage, and basic agricultural implements. Given the much smaller set of innovations during the Stone Age, it is quite easy for archeologists to deduce how each innovated tool built upon the previous tools developed for particular tasks.

Since the end of the Stone Age, over a short period of a few thousand years, the number of innovations and their level of sophistication have grown exponentially. Looking outward, tools have been developed that enable humans to travel to the moon (and soon, beyond), and to study the ultimate question of how the universe came into existence. Looking inward, although modern computing appeared only a few decades ago, people are already working on mind-boggling innovations that challenge the very notion of what it means to be human. For example, Dmitry Itskov, a Russian businessman and billionaire, with support from many wealthy individuals and some brilliant scientists, is formally pursuing the goal of creating avatars for human beings by 2045, such that people will be able to transfer their minds and achieve immortality.¹ The fact that people are working to transform such science fiction scenarios into reality with support from the world’s most successful businesspeople and scientists is a tribute to how far human innovation has come.

By tracing the entire history of innovation—both material innovation, which originated with hydrogen, and human innovation, which originated with the sharp-edged stone tool—several clear conclusions can be drawn: (a) the first innovations are very simple; (b) new innovations build upon previous innovations; (c) the path of innovation follows a very logical progression that, in hindsight, is quite straightforward; and (d) the speed of innovation is accelerating, owing to the quickly expanding set of existing innovations. All of these are great news for those who want to develop new and high-impact innovations.

The French philosopher René Descartes famously stated “Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)”.² The purpose of this statement is to assert that the very act of doubting one’s own existence is the proof that one’s own mind exists. This statement can be paraphrased in the context of innovation: I innovate, therefore I am alive. Over the course of history, innovations both small and large are what have enabled humans to become who we are today. Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that those who are truly alive are those who have created something new in whatever they are doing.

Innovation as a Scientific Discipline

Many people in both the practical field and academia argue that creativity cannot be taught; however, the creative process can be facilitated through activities such as brainstorming sessions. Others believe that tools or heuristics can be used to generate creative ideas in certain areas, such as the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), which is used mostly for engineering problems. This book is in the tradition of the latter, but goes much further. Specifically, I posit that innovation in general (i.e., the creation of any new thing, be it in the realm of physicality or the realm of thought) should be treated as a fundamental discipline of science to be studied alongside the natural sciences and social sciences. Work in this discipline will eventually reveal systems of axioms, theorems, corollaries, propositions, and conjectures, both derived from first principles (postulates) and abstracted as regularities from existing innovations created by nature and humans. Some of these regularities and principles will be deterministic (closed form), especially those related to the number of discoveries possible under certain conditions, while other regularities and principles will be probabilistic, especially those related to the (expected) value of one or a group of discoveries.

The content included in this book is an applied version of this school of thought, aimed at practitioners. The methods discussed in this book are based on some underlying theorems, corollaries, propositions, and conjectures that are not explicitly explored here; nevertheless, readers should be aware that these methods are not ad hoc heuristics.

Definition of Logical Creative Thinking (LCT)

I have three aims in developing an applied book following this school of thought. First, it should be useful to practitioners to solve real and important problems. Second, concepts should be easy to learn and able to be used by the majority of people without needing to have innate talents or specific backgrounds. Finally, it should be broad enough so that practitioners from different domains can derive benefits.

To highlight the relationship between the set of practical methods in this book and the theoretical perspective described above, the content of this book is called Logical Creative Thinking (LCT), and is focused on methods. Formally:

LCT posits innovation as a search process and innovators as explorers and consists of a system of logical search methods to identify novel, non-obvious, and valuable concepts.

Figure 1.1 The Three Aims of this Book

Source: Author

The name itself is intentionally stated as an oxymoron. Typically, logical thinking refers to a process whereby individuals follow a fixed set of rules to identify the “correct” outcome, while creative thinking refers to a process whereby individuals intentionally disregard rules to reach an unexpected outcome. These processes are the antithesis of each other in most cases. The LCT framework, however, is based on the postulate that a logical process can lead to pleasantly surprising outcomes that are unexpected and valuable. The intuition for this is quite straightforward. Take magic as an example. Magic acts fascinate audiences because they create something that seems impossible; nevertheless, every single magic act is performed by following a sequence of precise and logical steps. Like magic, LCT aims to produce novel, non-obvious, and valuable outcomes by following a logical process that can be learned, mastered, and broadly practiced.

Based on the underlying perspective that innovation is a rigorous scientific discipline, LCT redefines the two key components of innovation: innovation is seen as a search process, and innovators (i.e., inventors) are seen as explorers.

Treating innovation as a search process has fundamental implications for how an individual approaches innovation. First, it conveys the postulate that every innovation that will be “invented” in the future already exists in theory (i.e., is theoretically possible), but has simply not been discovered yet. Second, it means that the task of innovation is to employ (and/or develop) search algorithms that will enable individuals to efficiently make useful discoveries in this vast theoretical space. Finally, it means that the uncertainty in innovation is not whether it is possible to create something, but whether an already existing and valuable solution can be found before others find it. This is a very different type of uncertainty. From this perspective, logical processes, rather than unstructured and unreplicable processes, should be at the core of innovation.

Naturally, a person who engages in search should not be seen as an inventor, but as an explorer, just like the explorers who are looking for oil or mineral deposits, or who are searching for treasures and lost cities in the jungles and oceans. Redefining this role is critical and will encourage more people to get involved in the innovation process and learn how to improve it. First, unlike the traditional definition of an innovator/inventor, under this definition anyone can be an explorer, ...