Welcome to session seven. In this session, the point I'm going to try to make is this. Those of us who work for companies, or organizations, or universities, sometimes it's well regarded when we are found in our offices, apparently doing work. But the truth is to be creative to discover ideas you have to get out to the coal face. To the place where the work is being done. Where real people are living and breathing and buying and consuming and dealing with their problems. And sometimes when we do that ,when we get out to the coal face, we can come up with amazing things. So this whole session is devoted mostly to one story about my colleague Arie Ruttenberg, and how he created a great company as an advertising agency by getting out of his office, going into the field and making a keen observation. Before we go on to the story, how do you discover a great idea. Four key principles, these have come up earlier I believe but I'd like to re-emphasize them and kind of review them. First, the more choices you create for people, the more ideas you come up with, the better your chance to come up with a great one. And you don't know in advance what idea is going to be great and what idea is going to be unsuccessful. So you need to produce a large number of them. You need to generate an unending stream of ideas. And only later can you go back and sift through them, and discard some and improve some and combine some. And come up with that one idea that you actually implement, generate an unending fountain of creative ideas. Second, the more your ideas are anchored in real people and real needs, the better. So live in the world, live in the world. An MIT professor I once knew, professor of thermodynamics, George Hatsopoulos created a great company, Thermal Electronics. And he did this by, after being a successful professor he volunteered for hospital boards, he was president of the Boston Federal Reserve, he got out into the world, away from the ivory tower. And he learned about real problems, real things going on. And then he pulled technology from MIT to solve real problems that he'd identified, and created a Fortune 500 company with his brother. Third, the faster you can try your idea prototype, the better your chances to succeed. Innovation, creativity, they're an art not a science. We don't have real hard and fast principles. In fact, the whole idea of innovation is to break the rules rather than just follow them. So, try your idea, create a prototype. Try it on real people. This will help your chances in succeeding and will speed up your process, [COUGH] and it's the only way to know if you have a really good idea, if it really does create value to real living breathing people. And the last principal related to the third, the only arbiter of a good idea, it's not you, it's not the professor, it's not the textbook, it's the people, the users themselves. The people for whom you're trying to create value. They will tell you if this is really great or I really, really don't need this. So, a small story. The story of a mattress. [COUGH] My colleague, Arie Ruttenberg, as I mentioned, founded Israel's biggest advertising agency. And he did this by a combination of creativity and pragmatism. He got a contract for advertising from a very small company that made mattresses. What do you do when you have to come up with a campaign for selling mattresses? You sit in your office, you assemble a team, you scribble ideas on a flip chart. You discard some ideas, combine them. Well, Arie left his office, left his comfortable warm office. Got out into the field, went to visit the factory, and went to the place where the mattresses were actually being made. And he observed closely. And he saw something unusual. He saw one of the workers inserting a piece of stiffer foam into the place on mattress where our lower back is usually is. And he asked the worker, what are you doing? And he said, well, we think that the lower back needs support, so we've put a piece of firmer foam into the mattress, and that will provide well needed support for the lower back so that the mattress doesn't dip. And it's that dip that gives so many people back pain when they get up in the morning. Arie thought this was really interesting. So he went back to his office, thought about it, assembled his team and built a campaign based on the idea of breaking an assumption. The assumption until then, of all the companies that sold mattresses, was that the purpose of a mattress is to be comfortable and to give you a good night sleep. But what if a mattress that supported the lumbar region, the lower back, what if a mattress actually was healthy for you and kept your back healthy by letting your spine sleep straighter rather than dipping into a bulge of mattress? So, the mattress of this company, which the contract was given to my friend Arie, and his company, the campaign was based on a healthy mattress, a mattress that helped your health, rather than just was comfortable and that you sleep well. At first, the established companies ignored the campaign, but it caught on and sales grew rapidly. And then the other companies too, adopted the same idea. Our mattresses too are healthy mattresses, good for your back. And of course that only validated the campaign. And because the little company was really the first to explore this area of healthy mattresses, they were credible. The others were copying and validated their principle, and the little company went on to become one of the largest, if not the largest mattress company in my country. Conclusion, find your ideas, get out into the field, observe what is going on think about the assumptions, break some of the assumptions, and the assumption that a mattress is for comfort rather than for the health of your back. Try things, observe things, talk to people, and be unafraid to challenge things that everybody knows are absolutely true. That ends session seven. Please come back and join us for session eight. In session eight, we're going to again resume our journey inward into exploring who we really are, which is a key part of becoming a truly creative individual.
