Page 141 -

March, 2007

Elmar Mock is . . . Peter works for a pharmaceutical group that has hired Elmar’s
innovation consultancy, Creaholic, to help with a breakthrough
listening carefully product. The two men are part of a six-person innovation team IDEATION
holding a three-day offsite meeting.
The group is deliberately heterogeneous, a pastiche of differ-
as Peter elaborates ent experience levels and backgrounds. Though all members are 135
135
excitedly on an idea accomplished specialists, they joined the group not as technicians, DESIGN
but as consumers unsatisfi ed with the current state of affairs.
amid a sea of Post-it™ Creaholic instructed them to leave their expertise at the door and
carry it with them only as a “backpack” of distant memories.
For three days the six form a consumer microcosm and
notes smothering unleash their imaginations to dream up potential breakthrough

the walls . . . solutions to a problem, unbridled by technical or fi nancial
constraints. Ideas collide and new thinking emerges, and only
after generating a multitude of potential solutions are they asked
to recall their expertise and pin down the three most promising
candidates.
Elmar Mock boasts a long track record of breakthrough inno-
vation. He is one of two inventors of the legendary Swatch watch.
Since then, he and his team at Creaholic have helped companies
such as BMW, Nestlé, Mikron, and Givaudan innovate success-
fully.
Elmar knows how diffi cult it is for established companies to
innovate. Such fi rms require predictability, job descriptions, and
fi nancial projections. Yet real innovations emerge from something
better described as systematic chaos. Creaholic has found a
way to master that chaos. Elmar and his team are obsessed by
innovation.

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