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The
Toothache Tree, an innovation
tool, is highly recommended by
Ms Jynn Goh, 1AD (Intellectual
Property Policy Division), MinLaw
Headquarters. She noted: “The
Toothache Tree has helped our
division to visualise the causes
of our problem. In doing so, it
helped us focus and target
the strategies to solve our problem.” |
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What comes to your mind
when someone mentions a garage? For officers from
the Ministry of Law (MinLaw), a garage means limitless
creative and innovative fun!
Garage is MinLaw’s innovation platform for
generating and sharing a free flow of ideas. It
was named after the renowned Hewlett Packard (HP)
Garage, where the pioneers of HP started building
their very first product.
MinLaw’s Garage aims to capture the essence
of envisioning, developing and implementing an idea
by equipping officers with 12 creative thinking
tools. At the same time, it is the perfect virtual
innovation space for officers to unreservedly explore
and cultivate their ideas.
MinLaw’s Strategic Planning Division (SPD),
which is tasked with promoting innovation and knowledge
sharing in the organisation, conceived Garage way
back in 2002 with the intent of challenging the
conventional stereotypes of innovation and creativity.
After much effort, Garage finally materialised in
November 2004. It has an attractive yet simple design
and comes with 12 tools and 11 cultural archetypes.
Garage was rolled out gradually. Roadshows were
held to allow officers to familiarise themselves
with the different tools.
The first exposure to Garage impressed Mr Gary Chua,
IT Consultant from the Chief Information Officer’s
Office, who said that Garage “is a very refreshing
and innovative product”.
Garage aims to provide innovation tools for every
stage of the innovation process.
For example, tools such as Brutethink and SCAMPER
come in handy for brainstorming. For creating ideas
and implementing them, Idea Grid or Talk to User
are useful.
Inducing life into Garage are 11 “cultural
archetypes” — cartoon characters that
arose out of a study of MinLaw officers. The characters’
entertaining take on daily problems at work gives
officers something they can easily relate to.
Those worthy of mention are the Superboss, a superior
who has the welfare of his subordinates at heart
and is a risk-taker; Xin Si Liao, who is
sceptical about everything due to his stagnant career;
the Guardian Angel, a friendly supervisor who goes
out of the way for his colleagues and work; and
Madam Fox, who always ends work right on time and
does not do things outside her job scope.
These interesting characters give additional meaning
to the tools in Garage. For example, Mr Chua’s
favourite character is Xin Si Liao because
the character reminds him not to be sceptical.
The potential of Garage was fully exploited to make
it a user-friendly online platform. A broad range
of multimedia was used, including videos of MinLaw
officers demonstrating the use of different tools
and comic strips highlighting different scenarios
that the cultural archetypes face
at work.
Garage enhances the way MinLaw officers share ideas
and collaborate. It comes with a “save”
function, which allows officers to save their ideas
in their own library, so that they can always refer
to their initial ideas and improve on them.
Officers can publish their ideas on a discussion
board to get views and comments from other officers.
They can also email their ideas to specific people
they want to share their ideas with.
Garage is a significant innovation milestone for
MinLaw, which plans to encourage officers to use
it daily. MinLaw intends to ensure that all its
WITS teams have at least one member trained to use
Garage, so that the teams have access to the wide
range of tools for generating and testing ideas. |
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By
MinLaw
Next: A fitting solution
for tracking items |
