1.
Techniques to spark
great ideas
Lucy Gower - Innovation and
Development Manager NSPCC
@lucyinnovation

2.
This session
What is innovation?
Getting the best from your
ideas session
Breaking patterns - tools to
generate fresh ideas
Choosing the best idea
Your challenge
Keep innovation alive

3.
Creativity
having the ability or power
to create: human beings are
creative animals
Innovation
introducing something new –
actioning your idea

4.
Small fish
Small steps

5.
Giant leap

6.
Why bother with innovation?
1. What’s in it for you?
2. What’s in it for your
organisation?

7.
“As an organisation we need to be
creative to remain competitive –
especially now”
“If you are perceived as creative you are
asked to be involved in more projects,
and people get to know you – that can
only be a good thing”
“Makes things more fun”

8.
Solving the right problem
“When you are up to your neck in
alligators - its difficult to
remember that your original
objective was to drain the
swamp”

9.
“If I had one hour to save the
world, I would spend the first 55
minutes analysing the problem
and then 5 minutes on the
solutions” Einstein

10.
Ideas sessions
1. Lots of ideas
5. Diverge
2. critique
Generate a LOT of ideas

11.
Rules
Listen and build on others ideas
No idea killers
Respect others opinions
Enjoy yourself
Engage your inner child

12.
“ A new idea is delicate. It can
be killed by a sneer or a
yawn; it can be stabbed to
death by a joke, or worried
to death by a frown on the
right person’s brow”
Charles Brower

13.
SUN
Suspend + understand + nurture

14.
What pets do these people
own?

15.
“The best assumption to
have is that any commonly
held belief is wrong”
Ken Olsen CEO of Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC)

16.
Breaking Patterns
“Problems cannot be solved by
thinking within the framework
in which they were created”
“Insanity: doing the same things
over and over again and
expecting different results”

17.
Breaking Patterns

18.
Breaking Patterns
Break the rules
Ask What if?

19.
Your challenge
You are marketers of shampoo
Find ways to sell more

20.
Using What if? to get out of
your existing mindset
Step 1. What are the (unwritten)
rules of shampoo?
Step 2. Choose one and mess with
it

21.
Breaking Patterns
Where in the world?
Where else is my challenge faced?
Swipe with glee

22.
Breaking Patterns
Re-expression
“I imagined myself as a virus or
cancer cell and tried to sense
what it would be like” Jonas
Salk

23.
Re expression

24.
Get others on board

25.
If I had asked people what they
wanted they would have asked for
a better horse.
Henry Ford
What are you going to do Mr Edison -
put one in every town in the
country?!
Congress to Edison regarding the
telephone

26.
Make it real
Its never enough just to tell people
about some new idea. Rather, you
have to get them to experience it in a
way that evokes power and
possibility. Instead of pouring
knowledge into people's heads, you
need to help them grind a new set of
eyeglasses so they can see the world
in a new way.
John Seely Brown Seeing Differently:
Insights on Innovation

27.
Do SOMETHING and learn
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000
ways that won't work.”
Thomas Edison
“To develop working ideas efficiently - I
try to fail as quickly as I can.”
Richard Feynman 1965 Nobel prize
winner

28.
Techniques to spark
great ideas
Great expectations
Be childish
Focus – 80/20 principle
Structure idea sessions
Break patterns
Fresh Perspective
Make it real
Practice

29.
Momentum

30.
Find out more
www.sofii.org
Sticky Wisdom ?What if! The Innovation Company
Linchpin Seth Godin
Switch Chip and Dan Heath
Business beyond
the Box John O’Keefe
Breakthrough Thinking for Non Profit Organisations
Bernard Ross Clare Segal
Create! Mark Butcher

31.
Questions?
lgower@nspcc.org.uk
0207 428 1090
@lucyinnovation