How to Improve Individual and Team Creativity
and Innovation Quality and Capacity with

Harvard^® Creativity & Brainstorming Template

A proven enterprise-wide creativity instrument, the Harvard^® Creativity and brainstorming Template helps you weave continuous innovation into everything you do in your organization. The Template and its framework can be used alone or as complements to your favorite brainstorming method. Either way, they will add value to your thinking process, permitting your team to capture hidden opportunities and produce bold "out-of-the-box" innovations with less guesswork.

Designed by Alain Paul Martin, field tested by decision-makers in business and governments and continually improved by the Harvard University Global System^™'s team, the Template builds on the vast body of knowledge in the field, as outlined by the International Association of Innovation Professionals (IAIP). It helps executives and professionals (strategists, scientists, engineers, marketers, buyers and sellers, financial analysts, project managers and negotiators) seed, incubate and explore a complete panorama of choices in goals, deliverables, strategies, resources, processes, professional development, buy-ins, risk mitigation and implementation scenarios.

With the Harvard^® Creativity Template, you can widen the window through which opportunities are viewed, organize your thinking process and break down the barriers to innovation throughout the value chain at every step in a strategy, a policy or a project life cycle (mission-setting, market assessment, research, engineering, procurement, negotiation, execution, testing, communication, close-out). In negotiation and project management, the Template is a proven brainstorming instrument to seek a complete panorama of options regardless of the subject matter, be it goals, deliverables, resource or risk-mitigation strategies.

Even when the negotiation strategy or project plan is clear, its execution can be fraught with perils. That is why the tool's back page titled “Implementation Risk Mitigation” also provides a step-by-step scenario to help users manage implementation and transition risks, turn resistance to change into constructive engagement, address accountability and scheduling issues, residual risks and collateral damage. Thus, the Harvard^® Creativity Template and its framework are also crucial to facilitate the successful commercialization of innovative products and services.

Warning: Innovation is an iterative funneling process, but neither a single shot exercise nor the product of lone rangers. In a complex world where individuals rarely possess all the facts and no one has monopoly over creativity, teamwork is the best way to create novel and sustainable products, services, policies and ideas in general. The Harvard^® Creativity Template helps your team invent, capture and assess creative ideas in a methodical and synergistic way.