Innovative Thinking Workshop – Thinkertoys

LMI academy was invited to provide an Innovative Thinking Workshop using Thinkertoys for in-house training. I was one of participants and would like to summarize some tools we learnt from the workshop.  Mr. Dick Yip (Principal Consultant, LMI) was our trainer and the workshop named “Thinkertoys Innovative and Creative Thinking”. The whole workshop should be two days with 9 tools. We attended the first day for four tools.

The creator of Thinkertoys was Michael Michalko. Then Mr. Dick Yip briefed some cases about New Product / Service and Operation / Cost Saving, as well as, Cross-Industry Innovation.

Then Mr. Dick Yip quoted Charles H. Duell (Director of US Patent Office, 1899) statement that “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” This statement let me remember Murphy's Law stated “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

The tools from Thinkertoys were introduced. The first tool named “Time & Space”. It was similar to 9 Window. In our exercise, we only consider the “Present” and “Past”, neglected “Future”.

We used Disney issue as example and employed this tool.

Then Mr. Yip explained “Quality of our thinking is restricted by the ASSUMPTIONS we made” by using a tricky game. The second tool named “False Faces” which based on Reversing Assumptions.

The next tool Mr. Yip introduced to us was “Idea Box”. It pointed out several attributes and then combined it to be a new idea.

The most obviously example was Cart noodle “車仔麵”. You could combine what food you like.

The last tool named “BruteThink” (隨意聯想法). Mr. Yip introduced two methods. One was idea walk or Take a walk (散步) and the other was randomly to pick a word and make associations to the solution you were seeking. We called this method in Cantonese “九唔搭八”.

Today, we learnt and exercised four innovative tools below.