Frequently asked questions
How would my organisation use insights research? Insights research is often aimed at uncovering new and exciting opportunities to exploit. This could be compared to research projects where there is a well-established idea that someone wants to test or confirm. Because of the exploratory nature of insights research, it is common to study groups and individuals while looking for clues about their unarticulated motivations, unconscious behaviours or unmet needs. To achieve this, Cambridge Creativity have particular expertise in qualitative research methods, especially visual research techniques. These might include direct observation of people in their normal context of use, interviewing those people by themselves or in groups, having them draw out their situation as they understand it, having them record video diaries of their activities, and so on. All this provides information about who people are, what they think, how they behave and why they behave that way. This opens up new opportunities for product, service and system innovation. The evidence collected can also be formatted for communication within and across the client organisation so that buy-in can be negotiated at the appropriate levels.
How would my team 'learn' creativity? As with many aspects of learning, it is often best not to lecture on the finer points of theory and practice. Instead, it is generally more effective to construct opportunities in which learners can practise, develop and improve their creative behaviour. For example, groups can be set the task of generating ideas for a problem, with each member working alone and then all members working together. By alternating between these formats, and reflecting on the effectiveness of each, learners can become more confident in how they organise, structure and run brainstorming sessions. Another example might be to have learners contrast the experience of tackling a problem 'head on' with the experience of approaching it 'by analogy'. This reveals what effect analogical thinking has on problem solving, what kinds of analogies are most effective and how the kinds of analogies people generate usefully differ from one person to another. By constructing learning opportunities like this (and many others), creativity can go from being a vague and unfamiliar concept to a specific and actionable set of practices. This has been shown to build creative confidence and creative capacity.
Why do you offer insights research and creativity training? Although these two things might sound quite different to each other, they are actually very similar. At their core, both are based on understanding how people behave, often in ways that are not immediately obvious. Our insights research focusses on the way that customers think and act when they are undertaking certain tasks, such as using products. The principles underlying our creativity training are also based on understanding how people think and act, but these people might now be designers, problem solvers or entrepreneurs, and the tasks they are involved with might be activities of problem identification, idea generation or solution implementation. So, understanding and shaping people's behaviour is at the core of both our services, and they each strengthen the other. In fact, with our creativity training, we often have people reporting on the behaviour that they have previously observed amongst those who are trying to identify problems or develop solutions. We need to understand that behaviour if we are going to influence it. Conversely, in user insights work, we often observe users' creativity as they accommodate products that have not been thoughtfully designed, or as they invent new workarounds or modifications to satisfy their needs. It helps to understand creativity, both for observing the inventiveness of users, and in providing user insights that allow designers to innovate.
