John Cassaday, of Corus Entertainment opened the first annual CMA Advertising and Marketing conference by declaring that “Ideas and Ideation are back in style.” Following this proclamation, he went on to describe the 4 waves of ideation; The 70’s and 80’s, a stage of global systems integration to prevent being swallowed up, the digital wave (90’s), and the present state of post-dot-com bust.
Stressing the need to foster ideation within a business, John stressed the importance of separating your core and emergent divisions of your business, allowing your emergent side to cultivate new ideas which can then disperse into your core. With specific reference to Corus, John described three key lessons on ideation:
- Recognizing that process is key to innovation. The fostering of fertile minds by asking employees for their input not only allows employees to feel they have an impact, but taps a knowledge base of individuals in tune with your products.
- Innovation around your core business modes is just as important as innovation along the fringe. Allow both these sections to grow, and symbiotically enhance one another.
- Merchandise your successes. Capitalize on what you have created, and reap the fruits of your hard work.
Non-attendees should use John’s examples as a building blog to seed development. While his ideas may not be ideal for every scenario and organization, positive and creative work environments have high employee-satisfaction, and in turn ideation. One needs only to look at Google to see this. While bottom line may not be your goal in development, like any business idea, can have some monetary benefits.
Some good points but I think he may be overlooking the organizational effects of separating core and emergent divisions. From my experience, this creates political turmoil within the company. The perception of being new and exciting causes the emgergent division to appear like a favoured son, which peeves off the people left to run the core division.