- Disruptive Thinking: 5 attributes to consider by @jjsviokla
- Top 5 Innovation Trends via @innovate
- Is Innovation a Process or an Outcome? via @ralph_ohr
- Innovation Lessons From Tarzan by @skap5
- How biases, prejudices and ignorance can quietly undermine innovation via @chuckfrey
- The cave model of innovation via @philmccreight
- Innovation is Not Creativity – HBR
- Drive Innovation: Suggest Ideas, Don’t Propose Them via @marketingprofs
- When Innovation Strategies Combine – Forbes
- Who buys what? Research finds clues to marketing innovation – Physorg
Tag Archives: Thinking
Reimagine how you imagine
Alright it seems to me that the word ‘imagination’ doesn’t fit in a business context, unless you’re an ad agency it’s been completely banned! The mere mention of ‘let’s use our imaginations’ gets people nervous as if saying ‘what’s that?’ Ok Ok I get it, there are alternatives though and to battle that I use the word ‘reconfigure’ to talk to non-imagine people.
Take for example, an interior designer who might be adept at Custom furnishings, his/her job is to reimagine the interior of your house. They take what you have and reconfigure it in another way to arrive at something different. They tweak, move, shift, turn your living room in all sorts of ways sometimes by moving the objects already in place or by bringing in new objects from the outside or a mix of both.
The interior designer in the examples below focuses on ‘using what you already have’ to reimagine your living room. The objects might not be new but the small change in the arrangements makes the living room not just look different but also feel different.
This is what imagination is all about.
You don’t have to drink tequila to loosen up (although it certainly helps), you just have to ask ‘what if’ we take this and move it, remove it, turn it, twist it, shake it, etc and see what happens. So if you’re in the process of reimagining how your business will have to work in the future but lost your imagination on your way to being an adult, just put yourself in the interior designer’s shoes and start reconfiguring.
Remove the associative barriers that hinder new ideas
Image via Wikipedia
Last week I mentioned that the number one creative skill you need to master is the ability to free associate, to make connections between dissimilar things. I just stumbled into Ellen Di Resta’s post on the innovator’s perception where she probes further into the concept to which I left a comment:…
Declare war on yourself
Being unconquerable lies within yourself.
The guys @ThinkTank_ asked me for some blogging tips a few days ago and I posted some unconventional blogging advice at BM that I’m sure will rattle some cages. One of the actions steps at that I recommend at the end of the post is to ‘declare war on yourself’, or more commonly known as challenge your assumptions.
Assumptions are the shortcuts, rules of thumb, conventional wisdom, common sense, stuff we take for granted, ordinary thinking that as humans we use to get through daily life, which work for awhile, but they soon become stale truths, like weights holding us back from new ways of seeing, thinking and behaving.
Assumptions get us stuck in a never ending loop of repetition, and you know that leads to more of the same.…