Figure out your Confidence-Passion Matrix

In August 2015, MaGIC took about 40 Malaysian entrepreneurs on a two-week e@Stanford immersion programme in Silicon Valley, in collaboration with Stanford University.

On the first day, we had the pleasure of getting Tina Seelig, who runs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) and teaches at the d.school, to conduct a workshop on creativity and innovation, based on her new book InsightOut: Get Ideas out of Your Head and into the World.

Her class left me with such an impression that I wanted my team at MaGIC to experience what we’d learned in that session. I also wanted people to understand the difference between creativity and innovation, especially when it’s part and parcel of MaGIC’s brand name.

Tina opened by explaining the four components to the Invention Cycle. Here are my key takeaways:

Imagination: You envision something that doesn’t exist

Creativity: You apply imagination to address a challenge. This is where you figure out that there are multiple ways to solve an existing problem. Just because something is creative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innovative.

Innovation: When you apply creative ways to solve a new problem that hasn’t been thought of before, you’re creating a new product for a new market. This is called innovation.

Entrepreneurship: Finally, entrepreneurship is where you put innovation into practice and bring ideas to fruition.

When you repeat this process, you keep inventing groundbreaking products that solve real problems.

The next segment of her class focused on a new framework to help draw out motivations behind people’s behaviour. It’s called the Passion-Confidence Matrix. The matrix gets people to categorise activities based on our degrees of passion and confidence.

In this week’s team meeting, I did an exercise with my team by asking them to write down both personal and professional activities that fit into those four quadrants with post-it notes.

Here’s how mine looks like:

The idea is that each quadrant tells you how we can improve ourselves. The challenge is for us to move into the quadrant where we feel most passionate and confident.