‘Tomorrow is not what it used to be’: UHI’s Big Ideas session for businesses at SAMS

The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) hosted another in its HILINKS series of business development workshops on Wednesday 9th February 2011 at the Scottish Association of Marine Science at Dunstaffnage, near Oban.

HILINKS has three functions – business support; product development; and ‘knowledge transfer’ – links between academic expertise and commercial deployment.

Wednesday’s was a Big Ideas session, led by Kevin Byron from Queen Mary College, University of London in his private capacity as a freelance trainer in business skills.

It focused on ‘Big Ideas’ because it was about developing the strategic use and management of a very powerful and much abused business tool – brainstorming.

Kevin Byron’s own career looks like the result of enviably inventive brainstorming sessions.

He has worked as an engineer making business stencils, a stallholder at Covent Garden Market and with the former telecoms giant Nortel – during which time, ten years ago, he was involved in laying a ten mile submarine cable loop in Loch Fyne – which hit serious problems.

Remember the Hawker Siddeley Buccaneer jet – he worked on that.

Now he works with students at London University on entrepreneurships and last year saw ten of them set up businesses and survive the critical first challenges – with one featured in a BBC business programme.

The delegates at the Big Ideas session at SAMS said a lot about Argyll. There were representative from established businesses like Mathesons in Oban and the Tight Line in Lochawe. There were people with genuinely exciting start-up ideas, currently in planning. There was a manager from Argyll’s Gaelic College in Bowmore on Islay, Ionad Chaluim Chille Ile.

Together these attested to the will to regenerate, to drive forwards and to initiate – all support targets of the HILINKS scheme.

Also there as a delegate was Nicky Archibald from Argyll’s Business Gateway. This too was good evidence of people working on the business development sector anxious to keep abreast of new ideas and to learn more of possible client businesses.

Brainstorming

This is a term many people use – and a business development tool they apply – both with an inadequate understanding of what it is and how to deploy it effectively.

Kevin Byron used a clip from one of Alan Sugar’s Apprentice programmes – the famous ‘Pantsman’ sequence where Phil dominated the group, forcing his single idea upon them by a mixture of force and withdrawal of labour.

The lessons learned from analysing what was going on in this session were:

• brainstorming sessions need parameters that shape and focus the nature of the contributions made
• brainstorming is not a fast one-off procedure, it works through progressive stages and should be given several weeks to bring its results to maturity
• it’s important not to invest ownership in your own contributions – as this will prevent you seeing the potential value in other contributions can can lead to defensive or aggressive campaigning for your own ideas.

Kevin Byron said that in his experience, non-specialists in a brainstorming session are more use to specialists than are fellow specialists – because they bring in creativity and left-field approaches.

Describing creativity as a cluster of intuition, imagination, inspiration, ingenuity and insight, he noted that a great many people do not see themselves as creative. Mourning the fact that an often overly mechanistic society can stifle creativity -he affirmed that this can be reignited.

One of the identifying characteristics of creatives is that they absorb information and insights from across a very wide spectrum and make productive connections between apparently unrelated fields.

Brainstorming, though, begins with knowledge. It is not a content free zone as so many imagine. What it comes up with does not come for nowhere, just from somewhere unexpected.

The general pattern of brainstorming is a but like getting water from a rusty standpoint. The first sluice is a bit clunky and mundane – and then it starts to run clean. Everyone needs to be tolerant – of the mundane and the bizarre.

It’s important to write it all down and to judge or edit nothing at the ‘dumping’ stage.

And even more interestingly, the enduringly valuable ideas are often born from sticking with the process into and through the boredom zone. This is what Kevin Byron calls the ‘fuzzy’ period, when you start to wander and can stumble on a discovery.

Discoveries may be hoped for and worked for but they cannot be predicted – but participants in brainstorming sessions need to be motivated to try to find something.

The speed of change

Innovators take ideas that are  not necessarily their own but make them into something new that works.

According to Kevin Byron most serious money is made from innovation not creativity.

James Dyson didn’t invent the cyclonic process used in his vacuum cleaners. He invented the means of translating the system from the industrial to the domestic and he realised just what process it might revolutionise.

An interesting insight into the change of pace in today’s business world comes from comparing the timescales of the product development process in the 1970s with those of the 2000s.

The first phase of the process is innovation and the second is diffusion – commercial implementation, marketing and sales.

In the 1970s the innovation period for new products was anything from 6 – 32 years; with diffusion running from 15-20 years.

In the first decade of the new millennium, the innovation period was 1-5 years and the diffusion phase also 1-5 years.

We are now used to change, hungry for change and development and driven by the competitive imperative of change.

These insights, these skills and these drivers of change are key elements of the galvanic Argyll badly needs.

These are interesting times. Their motto might be the remark from Paul Valery, the French philosopher quoted by Kevin Byron to underline the essential nature of change: ‘Tomorrow is not what it used to be’.

The photographs above show, from the top:

• Big Ideas tutor, Kevin Byron
• UHI’s Scottish Association of Marine Science at Dunstaffnage
• Niall Matheson, Maggie Dera and Claire Smalley
• Daniel Macintyre, Niall Matheson and Neil Woodrow
• Claire Lever of UHI with Anna Price
• Niall Matheson, Claire Smalley and Neil Woodrow
• Anna Price, Daniel MacIntyre, Niall Matheson, Neil Woodrow
• One of the working sessions
• Kevin Byron with Nicky Archibald