All Entries in the "Innovation & Creativity" Category
Generating Ideas: Travel
If you’re stuck for ideas, buy a plane ticket and head for the highways. Travel is great for both sensory and intellectual stimulation. It can also be a lot of fun. It can open your door to new ideas and perspectives that you can synthesize or evolve into solutions for your own work or life.
Catching Your Ideas
Once you’re in the creative flow, you’ll discover that your brain is literally popping with new ideas. That’s all good when you’re at your office but what about those moments when you’re not? Like in an airport, on a train or walking in the park? Many people find they dream big but then forget their ideas. It doesn’t have to be so.
Power of Conversation for Creativity
Conversation is a powerful tool to open your mind and generate new ideas. If you want to unleash your creative potential, talk to someone else. Discover their perspective. Challenge it. Let them challenge your ideas. While this process generates lots of new ideas, it’s also a lot of fun.
Brainstorms – 7 Steps to Make Them Work Deliver Results
People ask me for tips on how to turn their brainstorms into ideas factories. Here are seven steps you should take when conducting brainstorms if you want to get their full benefit.
How to Conduct a Brainstorm
Brainstorming is one of the most popular and widespread tools people use to generate new ideas. Unfortunately it’s also one of the most abused. Because many people do not conduct brainstorms correctly, they miss many of its real benefits in generating new ideas. Here are some tips to help turn your next brainstorm from an event into an ideas factory.
First Step of Creativity: Imagine
The first step you need to take on the path to creativity and innovation is think big and dream big. The ICE Creativity process starts with unleashing your imagination so you can dream up as many ideas as possible. Without these ideas, you have very few solutions to choose from.
How Creativity Occurs: Turning it Around
Sometimes the best way to dream up a new idea or create a new solution is to turn the problem upside. Rather than looking at the problem itself, ask yourself what are the underlying causes? Is the problem merely a symptom rather than a real problem itself? What happens if you fix the cause rather than the problem?
How Creativity Occurs: Synthesis
Synthesis is another way that creativity occurs. It’s all about making connections and seeing how different ideas, concepts, objects, subjects and other factors relate. It’s looking at the links and discovering complements as well as duplications.
How Creativity Occurs: Evolution
Evolution is a powerful process that causes creativity. I’m not talking about the history of the earth here. Simply how everyday objects evolve as we get to use them and learn how to improve them. Evolutionary creativity occurs in everything from motor cars to the logos of television stations.
How Creativity Occurs: Re-application
It’s amazing up we get caught up in everyday objects and fail to see they can also help us do other things. The process of re-application can lead to some great new ideas. It involves thinking without a box while being very focused on solving a problem. In this article we think through creativity from a media perspective.