Abstract:

Organisations that lack creativity will fail. Traditionally new product ideas have come from many sources both within an organisation, e.g. management brainstorming, or from outside the organisation through traditional marketing research techniques such as gap analysis, dissatisfaction analysis, etc. However there is a third way - involve consumers and customers in idea generation exercises. This has never been easy. How do you know who should be included in these projects? This paper discusses the important issue of creativity and innovation. We aim to define creativity in a way that is useful for practitioners and explain how an organisation can foster it. Importantly we demonstrate how you can measure different types of creativity in people. TNS has profiled its online access panel into respondents that exhibit differing styles of creative thinking and has established how they can be best utilised.