Tag Archives: Creativity

What if you did things wrong?

in Innovation

Dolls are supposed to be cute right? Not so according to UglyDolls. They designed their dolls to be the opposite of conventional wisdom.

UglyDolls might have asked themselves: What if we designed our product the wrong way? What if we made dolls that are ugly instead of cute?

According to WSJ, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is trying to capture mistakes like this, with the idea that making mistakes on purpose is something that all of us could be taught. Today the business school named the winners of its first Brilliant Mistakes Contest, which awarded prizes (including Southwest Airlines tickets, free courses and conference tickets, and lunch with a contest judge) to people whose mistakes were the most productive.…

Innovation must reads of the week: If we had a blank slate

in Uncategorized
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Engage in sci-fi thinking to understand what makes people tick

in Creativity, Innovation, Leadership
Shock diamond

Image via Wikipedia

Last week I gave a workshop on how to mine social networks for insights. I used Facebook’s Fan Pages as a use case. Many of the participants were surprised as they didn’t visit Fan Pages and thought most were spammy. They also said they didn’t like it when brands suddenly went off topic because businesses should be serious, not fun (dominant assumption calling to be turned upside down).

And boy were they surprised with what I told them next……

MBA in Curiosity

in Creativity, Innovation

Last month I got invited to be part of a small group of Businessmen/Entrepreneurs/Consultants/CEO’s that meet once per month to talk about technology and innovation. We’re calling it Mix 2.0 for some reason.

Our first meeting was Wednesday. We met at (ironically) Bar20 at VIA Corporativo, which is one floor beneath my office. There were about 15 of us and we had the place all to ourselves. We sat in a circle, and to get things rolling we introduced ourselves.

The 2nd person to introduce himself is an inventor. Among other things, he worked on the Nintendo Wii controller about two years before the Wii came out. As you can imagine he’s a very interesting person. He spent about 10 minutes talking about his career. This set the tone for everyone else. I soon started thinking: Let the I-out-credential-you begin!…

3 cognitive limits we must overcome to think differently

in Creativity, Psychology

Expertise is the enemy of innovation right? Yes, but even experts can think differently. And, there’s much to learn from them on how they are able to overcome their ‘know-it-all’ tendencies.

Indeed, research into expertise and expert performance explains how great strategists use mental frames to break cognitive barriers that prevent others from seeing new options. It is not just that experts know more about the problem—in fact they often know less—but they think differently. They restructure, reorganize, and refine their representation of knowledge so as to more efficiently apply knowledge to solve problems.

Thinking differently is just a matter of shifting your frame. Of seeing things from a different point of view. But what inhibits us from being able to think differently?

More specifically, what happens inside our minds that limit our capacity to think differently?…

What can you do to improve your business in a day?

in Creativity, Innovation

That is the question. That and what can you do better tomorrow that you did today?

With that in mind, I’m organizing a Business Hack-a-Thon next month in my office building. It’s for us and everybody else in the building. I want everyone to come together and see different points of view. This is an opportunity to mix it up, get people uncomfortable, change roles and see anew.

This is really a test so I can then hopefully expand it outside the four walls.

Anyway, one of the key questions that’s come up while we’re preparing for this is: how do we put a concept to the test  if my business is not online?…

10 Most Popular Innovation Posts of 2011

in Innovation

2011 is over. Lots of blog posts were written this year, lots of new and interesting friends were made, lots of ideas were crystallized and lots of value was created.

It was fun looking through the archives to find those posts everyone liked the most. It was fun to revisit them and re-read the comments you left. I still feel like it was just yesterday that I wrote them. Man time goes by very fast!

Here then are the 10 most popular posts of 2011 (+ 2 more) in no particular order.

Thank you for sticking around and I look forward to learning more from you in the next year.

Happy 2012 🙂…