Creativity Lab helps businesses accent thinking outside the box
By Graham Norris | Publish Date:01/13/2006 | Story Type:Economy
All of the doors in Building 53 of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) used to be a dark blue or grey until, one day, someone painted one of them bright green.
"The building manager called me up to complain, saying we could do what we liked inside the room, but we couldn't mess with his doors," said Ninon Wu, whose title at ITRI's Creativity Lab is "Centaur, Wild and Free," and who commissioned the artist that painted the door green.
ITRI is a publicly funded research center whose mission is to help businesses develop products and manufacturing techniques. It has midwifed some of Taiwan's most successful companies, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest made-to-order chipmaker. But with much of Taiwan's manufacturing leaving the island for lower-cost countries, ITRI is facing somewhat of a dilemma. The green door is a sign of things to come, and the building manager, in many ways, a symbol of what has to go.
"Painting the door green showed we are willing to take risks, and people see things are changing at ITRI," Wu said.
The Creativity Lab has moved from the room on the other side of the green door to much more airy premises on the ground floor of the building, also designed by Wu, allowing the people inside more space to do what they are supposed to: think outside the box.
Although she plays down her role, Hsueh Wen-jean--known to her co-workers as "Future Producer"--is the driving force behind the Creativity Lab. The lab, she explained, was born out of a need for ITRI to move on from its original mission of helping industry make more things more cheaply.
"Pure manufacturing is no longer going to bring more profit or help the economy grow," she said. "We have to face the reality that others can do manufacturing more cheaply, and that in some ways we are being replaced." Hsueh herself is an engineer by training. She earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology and worked for a while in the United States before returning to Taiwan and joining ITRI's Opto-Electronics and Systems Laboratories.
While working there, she and some of her colleagues started to realize that in order to progress and follow a logical path in solving problems, they would have to look beyond their technical training.
"Before I was an engineer, I was a person. I care about a lot of things, not just technology," she said. "We were just working with things--equipment, components or whatever--without caring what they are really for. Do they make people lead happier lives?" Hsueh can give numerous examples of how technology is failing people. "I have a cell phone, but I use only 1 percent of the functions. People don't know how to use them, apart from showing off," she said. "What does the iPod really do for us? It's not all that clear. E-mail can help me communicate with you, but it means I don't have to see you in person. Is that good?" The key, Hsueh said, is to start from the perspective of the human, rather than the thing, to create value for people. What if, instead of just words and pictures, mobile phones could effectively convey emotions, such as love and caring? It may sound far-fetched, but then, that is the point of the Creativity Lab.
But how do the lab folks actually go about their work? To answer this question, it is perhaps best to start with who they are. Hsueh says she looks for people with multidisciplinary backgrounds, preferably a technical side combined with an artistic or humanistic side. Some of them are drawn from ITRI's regular legion of engineers, while many are recruited from outside. All have playful monikers, like "Master Artificer," "Inspirational Catalyst" and "Magic Stargazer." The lab's workers are divided into three teams focusing on culture, planning and research. Wu leads the culture team, which is responsible for the environment in which everybody works--hence the green door. They consider issues such as codes of behavior for how staff members treat each other, and how to enable these people from disparate backgrounds to communicate with each other on the same wavelength.
The planning team deals with the lab's clients--government agencies and private companies--and collects information for the research team, which does the grunt work of asking questions and coming up with innovative product ideas. Each team does a lot of brainstorming.
Giving the lab a general sense of direction is a theme of the year. Last year's theme was "being playful," and for 2006, it is "future living space." Giving the lab focus are its customers, in the form of a group of companies known as the Next Consortium.
The consortium members are about as diversified as one could hope. They include motor scooter maker Sanyang Industry Co. Ltd., chipset maker VIA Technologies Inc. and Hocheng Corp., the manufacturer of HCG-brand faucets and bathroom fixtures. The remaining three are flat-panel display and projector maker Chi Lin Optoelectronics Co. Ltd., the glass arts firm Liuli Gongfang and ball bearing maker Hiwin Technology Corp.
Each company must come up with a "champion team" comprising members from across the company. The lab conducts workshops to help the companies develop effective discussion processes that will lead to a habit of creative thinking about how to solve problems. This means brainstorming not just at meetings but wherever people bump into each other, whether it is at the gate or in the restroom.
The first step, in other words, is to change the culture within the company so as to foster creativity. The second step is to identify collaborative projects that two or more companies can work on with the Creativity Lab. The thinking is that, because so many ideas will necessarily fall by the wayside, it is best to come up with as many as possible in order to hit on a few good ones that can really generate income. Seemingly crazy ideas are welcome, as even the worst of them can stimulate creation of the best.
The thing these consortium teams and the lab have in common, Hsueh said, is that they all wonder what the future will be like and want to come up with innovative products. "Sanyang makes scooters at the moment, but maybe in the future they'll be making flying carpets," she quipped.
By mixing up the companies' core technologies, they can come up with concepts such as a scooter equipped with a flat-panel display, or a toilet seat that uses ball bearings to make it adjustable for disabled people. While most of these ideas will never come to fruition, the consortium's members can work together to try different things while avoiding the catastrophic failure that a company can suffer by pursuing a bad idea on its own. Although she declined to elaborate, Hsueh said that VIA and Liuli Gongfang are collaborating on a project.
Membership in the consortium does not come cheap. Members have to pay US$200,000 a year, but they get to share all of the intellectual property that the consortium comes up with and apply it to their respective businesses. Affiliated sponsors can join up for considerably less, but they have only limited access to the intellectual property.
Hsueh said she wants to attract more companies into the consortium, but that they are still waiting to observe its results before committing themselves. "I'm amazed these six companies joined us at a time when we had nothing," she said. "My conclusion is that they are more futuristic in mindset, rather than result-oriented people who need to see something concrete before taking a risk." The researchers work on the same "demo or die" principle as the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with which the Creativity Lab has a strategic partnership. They must come up with demonstrations of their ideas to show what they do and how they work. A workshop at the lab lets them make as much noise as they like in creating mock-ups of their inspirations.
In operation for less than two years, the lab has so far set no hard and fast criteria for judging whether or how far to explore a concept. Hsueh said that at this stage, she resists moves to impose revenue targets on the lab's projects, arguing that forcing it to focus on short-term financial gain would undermine its long-term creative goals. A better measure of success will be the overall outcome of the Next Consortium over a multi-year period, she said.
That is not to say the lab has nothing to show for its efforts. One researcher, an artist, has created a robotic fish. Hsueh was skeptical at first about his ability to create such a robot, but she gave him some money, and he went to find the technical help he needed outside the lab. While the commercial potential of such a creation has yet to be determined, the researcher's next goal is to create a school of such fish and then film them swimming in formations for artistic effect.
For every success, there are numerous projects that do not get off the ground or prove to be impractical. But that is all part of the process at the Creativity Lab.
"Most projects will fail, but we don't like to call it failure," Hsueh said. "A culture of success can tolerate mistakes, and all great entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes."
[From Taiwan Journal: Creativity Lab helps businesses accent thinking outside the box]