6. Idea Generation

This chapter focuses on

6. Idea Generation

This chapter focuses on

Skills

Skills

Intellectual property

Skills Intellectual property

Development

Skills Intellectual property

Development Source of ideas

6.1 Creative skills are the hardest to find – and easiest to lose

One in eight companies has

experienced difficulty recruiting

design/creative personnel.

The danger of losing design and creative staff to overseas firms

was also very real.

“The best talent always wants to work on the best project. There is a risk that if wecannot source interesting, cutting edge things to work on – or that Australia cannotattract those kinds of project – we will find it increasingly difficult to keep talenthere.”

- Animator, Sydney

Good creative people enjoy working as freelancers.

The freedom, flexibility and creative variety offered by freelancing was

attractive to many artists.

6.2 Creative people are hardest to manage and most resistant to Processes

Process is not the enemy of a `fun’ and dynamic workplace

culture.

“We are struggling with putting formal processes in place at the moment. Westarted out as a company of young people and we prided ourselves on the fact thatthe environment was relaxed and that’s how we wanted to work. But we haveoutgrown that approach, and we are coming up against some internal resentmentto new systems.”- Interactive advertising company, Melbourne

University and TAFE graduates required intensive input from employers to understand timelines and quality requirements, as well as specific software packages in many cases.

University and TAFE graduates required intensive input from employers to understand timelines and quality requirements, as well as specific software packages in many cases.

This imposed a considerable burden, particularly on smaller companies.

Only 20% of survey respondents said there were no job roles

requiring further training.

6.3 Ideas are generated internally, and generally not supported by

formal processes

Figure 11 Source of ideas reported by companies in the survey

Several companies mentioned that working with customers on new ideas was potentially

problematic,

A Perth post production company said that

collaborating with one of their customers on a project ended poorly.

Conversely an Adelaide interactive multimedia company described the idea generation process as “a

series of common client requests”. Client feedback was sought before ideas were taken to the next level.

Companies in focus groups and interviews spent considerable time on new idea generation.

“We try to spend about 20% of our time on non-client work.”

- Focus group participant, Perth