Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product, service or process that creates value for business, government or society.
Some people say creativity has nothing to do with innovation— that innovation is a discipline, implying that creativity is not. Well, I disagree. Creativity is also a discipline and a crucial part of the innovation equation. There is no innovation without creativity. The key metric in both creativity and innovation is value creation.
Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. You can learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesing information. Learning to be creative is akin to learning a sport. It requires practice to develop the right muscles and a supportive environment in which to flourish.
Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviours that optimize your brain for discovery:
1. Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
2. Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom
3. Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
4. Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives
5. Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge
Facts About Creativity.
We’re led to new wonderful opportunities.
The current of creativity is like a river finding its sea. It always leads us to bigger waters. So even a small creative project might open us to whole new possibilities. We never know where it might lead.
On a whim I got this idea to make a board game. My friends loved to play it and soon, I was hosting game parties once a month at my house for up to thirty people. It became such a wonderful way to bring people together, a publisher picked it up and today everyone can play it.
But we don’t do it for product. We do it for pure joy and interest.
For sure with any kind of project, as our creative juices get flowing, there’s an infinite pool to draw from to keep our inventiveness growing.
While doing the things we enjoy, even if it seems small or easy, the self judgments we make (like we’re not enough, or bad, or we don’t matter) are suspended. We do it just because of the sheer delight of doing it.
It’s the permission we give to ourselves to do what we love that makes us forget we’re in the slumps. The more we engage, the more our spirits fly.
Doing something that is not demanding or to win is the antidote to any dreariness or blahs. My mood always uplifts when I’m creating something just for my own gratification.
It's always new Every time we make stuff we’re embarking on fresh, unknown territory. Each time we begin and as we continue, we’re traversing on a new adventure.
Creativity has this awesome way of always changing things up. Even if it seems “mundane” like stirring a soup, or knitting a loop, or moving my body, it always brings a different experienceWe get out of our own way.
When doing something we enjoy, we’re focused
on the act of doing it rather than self-ruminating. It immediately gets us out of our head.
So much of our unhappiness is bred from being fixed and consumed by our thoughts and behaviors. We tend to observe our feelings, words, and actions far too often.
But when we’re engaged creatively, we’re freed from any internal traps that say something about us, especially because it doesn’t have to be so serious.
Overcoming myths about creativity
Beliefs that only special, talented people are creative (and you have to be born that way) diminish our confidence in our creative abilities. The notion that geniuses such as Shakespeare, Picasso, and Mozart were `gifted’ is a myth, according to a study at Exeter University. Researchers examined outstanding performances in the arts, mathematics, and sports, to find out if “the widespread belief that to reach high levels of ability a person must possess an innate potential called talent.”
The study concludes that excellence is determined by:
opportunities
encouragement
training
motivation, and
most of all, practice.
“Few showed early signs of promise prior to parental encouragement.” No one reached high levels of achievement in their field without devoting thousands of hours of serious training.
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