Thinking outside the box is the conventional strategy for finding innovative solutions to difficult problems, but it may not be the best way to go about things. “We need to do the opposite and limit ourselves,” posits Gideon Nave, Wharton’s Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Associate Professor of Marketing. Take this classic example: Challenging an author in the 1950s to use only certain first-grade-level words led to the publication of the iconic children’s book The Cat in the Hat. A subsequent bet between Dr. Seuss and his publisher that he couldn’t write a book with just 50 unique words likewise led to the creation of Green Eggs and Ham.
The idea that narrowing our options can spark some of our best thoughts is key to Nave’s undergraduate and MBA course Idea Generation and the Systematic Approach for Creativity. Equipping students with formal ways to spur creativity is meant to help them break out of a mold called fixedness, where we assume certain characteristics or parameters that limit our thinking — for example, that a puzzle has specific solving rules that we impose ourselves. (See the photo caption “A Familiar Saying, Explained.”) “Getting rid of fixedness is a common goal of five different templates for generating creative ideas that I teach,” says Nave.
The approach for The Cat in the Hat can perhaps best be described as subtraction: breaking down an existing product or solution (in this case, a book) into many parts (pages, words, illustrations) and then removing or imposing restrictions on certain ones (limiting the use of most words in the English language) to come up with something new. Another approach, task unification, adapts products to serve additional functions. Captcha tests online are both a security measure and a way to teach algorithms to recognize stairs, stoplights, and other objects.
While using a toolbox of strategies isn’t a surefire way to hatch the next big thing, it may increase the odds. “Instead of randomly going from a problem to a solution, we are going from a product and slowly, in a series of steps, searching manually over a smaller space,” says Nave. His version of the course is built on the systematic inventive thinking methodology from Reichman University’s Jacob Goldenberg and others as well as earlier versions of the course taught by Yoram “Jerry” Wind and Rom Schrift. Building on those versions, Nave incorporates his expertise in neuroscience into his teachings.
In what may have been serendipitous timing, the professor’s first time teaching the course coincided with the release of ChatGPT, which he immediately integrated into the curriculum. “AI is very useful in this process,” he says. “It is good at generating ideas and excellent at doing things systematically.”
Published as “At the Whiteboard With Gideon Nave” in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Wharton Magazine.
