Making innovation visible: What creative methods can achieve in cross-innovation processes
In innovation processes, the best idea is often already present in the (cross-innovation) space. It just needs to be made visible and tangible.
Through cross-innovation, we bring businesses and organisations together with the creative industries. To do this, we use creative methods that shift perspectives, reveal blind spots and turn initial ideas into viable approaches.
These methods are not off-the-shelf: the Cross Innovation Hub identifies and adapts working methods from the creative industries specifically for cross-innovation processes. This makes innovation management more sensory, visual and empathetic – and ensures that the resulting innovations are better aligned with real needs.
Creative methods open up new avenues
One example of this is Grid Condensation. The Cross Innovation Hub adapted this method from the visual arts, translating visual research into structured idea development.
Instead of discussing a challenge solely in verbal terms, teams work within the realm of possibilities offered by images, associations and a shared grid. They gather visual stimuli, cluster motifs and gradually condense the results into potential avenues for solutions.
“In innovation processes, the best idea is often already present in the (cross-innovation) space. It just needs to be made visible and tangible.”
At first glance, this sounds open-ended – and that is precisely its strength. After all, many innovation processes get bogged down too early in familiar ways of thinking: What is feasible? What do we already know? What can be explained straight away?
Grid Condensation opens up a different approach. Images bring nuances, moods, contradictions and unexpected connections into play. From a multitude of visual impressions, the result is not a loose collection of ideas, but a condensed selection of viable approaches that can be developed further in a targeted manner.
The creative industries as game-changers
These contributions from the creative industries are genuine game-changers for innovation processes. Creative professionals are skilled at interpreting open-ended stimuli, shifting meanings, sifting through material in a structured way, and creating new connections from the seemingly unconnected.
This is precisely where their particular value lies for companies and organisations: they not only provide new ideas, but also bring with them ways of working that make innovation more emotional, more vivid, bolder – and at the same time more concrete.
“Creative people are skilled at interpreting open-ended ideas, reinterpreting meanings, sifting through material in a structured way, and creating new connections from what appears to be unrelated.”
From image to solution: Grid Condensation
Grid Condensation helps teams to sort through and condense a large volume of visual impressions. This creates a shared grid that makes associations visible, reveals patterns and uncovers new avenues for solutions.
This ensures that openness does not lead to arbitrariness. On the contrary: the method creates a structured process in which teams can decide together which ideas are relevant and which approaches should be pursued further.
A look inside the toolbox
Grid Condensation is just one example of the wide variety of creative methods used at the Cross Innovation Hub. With the Futures Cube, for example, questions about the future become concrete and malleable: using a sort of ‘Rubik’s Cube’, teams combine social, technological, economic, environmental and political developments to develop a rich array of possible future scenarios. Embodiment, on the other hand, expands user research to include direct experience: teams actively put themselves in their customers’ shoes, not only to analyse needs, routines and decision-making logic, but also to better understand them and thus arrive at compelling solutions.
This is how creative abundance is transformed into a well-considered selection.
Conclusion
Creative methods broaden our perspective on innovation. They reveal what often remains hidden in purely analytical processes: moods, needs, contradictions, potential and new connections.
The Cross Innovation Hub makes these capabilities accessible to businesses and organisations – as both a method and a process within a concrete, collaborative innovation practice.
Curious? Try out our work with creative professionals.
About the author
As knowledge manager at the Cross Innovation Hub, Dr Susanne Eigenmann is responsible for all questions relating to the theory of innovation, cross-industry collaboration, creativity, futurology and trends. She develops topics, provides background information and decision-making aids, and organises discussion and communication events on all issues relating to cross innovation.
