Five Reasons Why You Should Think Like a Criminal
Have you seen the movie The Day of the Jackal? [...]
Boosting the Brain’s Creative Powers & Creating the Best Environment for Innovation
Creative thinking can be trained, and an environment for innovation can be purposefully built. Often plagued by a sense of urgency and pressure the modern office does not appear to be the ideal incubation opportunity for innovation – and yet there are strategies that can be used to defy the odds. So just how do we maximise the brain’s neurological capabilities in the midst of the busy contemporary working environment?
Rearrange the Process
If you want to innovate with a process or a service then try focusing on this word – rearrange. Describe your current process as a series of steps. Draw them out as a block diagram. Now try moving the blocks around and see where this leads.
Ever Heard of the Groan Zone?
The switch from divergent to convergent thinking in innovation workshops is smooth in literature but extremely tough in reality. In this article Susanna Bill explains how she was on the verge of making a huge mistake until she learned about the middle component between divergence and convergence: the groan zone.
Mind Mapping Software: A Simple Approach to Idea Management
Small to medium-sized businesses typically don't need an enterprise-level idea management system. What they need is a simple tool that enables them to capture, improve, evaluate and take action upon their best ideas. Mind mapping software is a tool that can help.
Generating Creative Ideas with Hieroglyphics
Using hieroglyphics for ideation is an unusual but potentially viable lateral thinking technique from Tom Wujec's excellent book, Five Star Mind.
How Design Thinking Can Enrich Business and Marketing Innovation
Design empowered innovation combines the best of right and left brain thinking. It has the capacity to deliver better ideas, with more relevance, realized earlier. By focusing on individuals, moments and journeys in ethnography, insights become deeper. By embracing chaos and play in brainstorms, creative teams can explore further. By iterating and early prototyping, ideas become real and develop more rapidly.
What Artists can Teach Creative Thinkers
Artists are innately creative, of course. That's why the rest of us, who are seeking to expand our creative powers, can learn much from them. Danielle Feliciano highlights three characteristics that we can borrow from artists to spur our own creative muse.
Stop the Reckless Brainstorming and Focus your Creativity!
In their desperation to be innovative, companies often brainstorm themselves into idea overload, generating ideas that ultimately are failures. But what if companies could focus those brainstorming efforts and develop an efficient, targeted process for creativity? InnovationManagement asked Tony Ulwick to share his thoughts on how to leverage the creativity and get a better outcome.
Teaching Lateral Thinking to Leaders
Everyone can greatly benefit from improved lateral thinking skills, and no one more than entrepreneurs, managers and CEOs. This is exactly where motivational speaker and author, Paul Sloane focuses his energy. In this week's Hello There Paul tells IM about his experience and asks for your input on his most recent project.
What is lateral thinking?
Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means. So when I saw a very clear definition and description of it in Paul Sloane's excellent new book, How to be a Brilliant Thinker: Exercise Your Mind and Find Creative Solutions, I couldn't resist sharing it with you.
How to Think What No One Else Thinks
How can you think of things that no-one else thinks of? The answer is by deliberately taking a different approach to the issue from everyone else. There are dominant ideas in every field. The innovative thinker purposefully challenges those dominant ideas in order to conceive new possibilities, explains Paul Sloane.
How to Generate Powerful Ideas by Thinking Laterally
What is lateral thinking and how can you utilize it to generate great ideas? Paul Sloane provides us with an informative overview.
To Innovate, Force Yourself to Take a Different Point of View
We have to deliberately take a different point of view and come at the problem from a new direction before we have a chance of creating a radical solution, advises Paul Sloane.
Adopt and Adapt Ideas to Drive Innovation
What do Clarence Birdseye, Alexander Graham Bell and George de Mestral have in common? As Paul Sloane explains, it has to do with a unique way of looking at the world around them with a creative eye.