Spotlight on Mike Mawbey, Portfolio Risk Manager
// investment
Words by Erica Wolfe-Murray
Intelligent Creativity is a truly simple methodology that helps you build new and exciting IP potential from any underlying idea of yours. It encourages you to explore your idea through creative channels you may not have considered previously to ensure you understand how to maximise rights and revenues to their widest extent.
You can download the Intelligent Creativity Workbook here.
So how does it work? When we come up with a new creative idea, most of us default to the area of expertise we know best. If you are a documentary maker, you automatically turn your idea into a documentary treatment; if you are an illustrator – you default to an image; a writer to a book or script and so on.
We effectively create a self-limiting, narrow output for what instead could be a rich, layered concept with potential to work in myriad ways, on different channels, in physical form or using formats we’ve never considered. Each of which could bring a plethora of additional IP, rights and potential revenues.
Intelligent Creativity ensures you avoid the narrow output, helping you explore the richness of your idea effectively, envision the breadth and depth of possibility with the purpose of building IP that you can harness and exploit. Either within your business, by working collaboratively or by licensing your IP.
It can help you consider building a 10-15 year plan for your IP, rather than just a one-off project.
Why did I create it?
I’ve worked across the breadth of the UK’s creative sector. And what struck me repeatedly was that millions of brilliant creative ideas never see the light of day because clients, commissioners, funders, investors etc didn’t have the vision the creator did. So, on receipt of a ‘no, sorry, not for us’, those glorious ideas get consigned to a file, never to see the light of day again.
But just because those ideas didn’t get a ‘yes’ from the gatekeepers to money or an audience within that creator’s default channel, doesn’t mean to say that the idea was poor. Or worthless. Or should be ignored.
I needed to find a way to help creators see how valuable their idea/property could be in areas besides their default channel. To show them how their idea could find its own audience(s) in interesting and different ways, to encourage them to really push the underlying concepts of their ideas to trigger new ways of getting it out there.
I run a company called Lola Media. I specialise in working with creative and cultural organisations helping them harness what they already own in new ways to generate additional products, services, audiences, revenues. It’s what I love doing.
Rather than work with archives, business assets and existing IP, Intelligent Creativity explores and innovates with the creator’s idea. It’s that simple.
3-4 things people will learn from the book
How to use the underpinning concept of your idea in inventive ways you may not have thought of.
A simple process that makes you consider a range of different channels you may not have used before, perhaps because they are outside your expertise.
A process that truly any colleague, business partner, friend, intern can contribute to.
