“Creativity flourishes through play and fun, and an open mind to think the impossible.”– Bettina von Stamm, Catalyst & Founder, Innovation Leadership Forum
Websites
Website dedicated to creativity and innovation with useful sections on tools and techniques as well as news, articles and bloggs
Familiar to most, it consists of 4 basic rules for the team-based idea generation:
- Postpone and withhold your judgment of ideas
- Encourage wild and exaggerated ideas
- Quantity counts at this stage, not quality
- Build on the ideas put forward by others
- Every person and every idea has equal worth
The Centre for Creative Leadership offer a number of innovation related training programmes and tools.
http://www.creativeideas.20m.com/
Website with lots of links to interesting articles and other information relelvant to creativity and innovation.
http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques
Just what you need: a website that lists all creativity techniques in alphabetical order!
This website has also a list of creativity techniques though much shorter than mycoted.com. However, they also have stuff on project management, time management and other. Worth checking out!
http://www.edwarddebonofoundation.com
In 1967 de Bono developed the concept of lateral thinking – as opposed to vertical/logical thinking – to come up with more creative/innovative solutions
In 1985 de Bono introduced his 6 thinking hats
- White Hat –Information known and needed
- Red Hat – Feelings Hunches and Intuition
- Yellow Hat – Optimism: Values and Benefits – Why it will work
- Black Hat – Negative Judgment/Devil’s Advocate – Why it will not work
Caution – Not argument - Green Hat – Possibilities, Alternatives and New Ideas
- Blue Hat – Managing the Thinking Process
Tends to be used more for the evaluation rather than the generation of ideas.
LEGO’s website promoting their toys as teambuilding tool. As they state, “LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an efficient, practical and effective process that works for everyone within an organization.”
It was also mentioned on anther couple of website:
(1) www.trainingreport.ca/articles/story.cfm?StoryID=90 – a description of a training programme outline for which lego is used to live-up a conservative audience;
(2) www.squarewheels.com/content/legotrdev.html; extract from the website: “We asked the TRDEV community ** about experiences using LEGO for training and development activities. Without exception, people reported positive experiences. Participants like assembling structures and meeting challenges with the pieces and facilitators like designing activities with them. They are colorful, reusable, flexible in application, and engaging for participants. And it took many of them immediately back to a playful childhood framework of experimentation and concentration.”
Developed by the consultancy of the same name it involves two basic techniques: (1) making the strange familiar – we have the habit of forcing problems into familiar patterns by thorough analysis a better understanding of the problem will be achieved, and (2) making the familiar strange for which Synectics suggest 4 approaches:
- personal analogy – tends to be based on role play where individuals identify themselves with the problem, e.g. what would I feel like if I were a closure on this wide-necked bottle;
- direct analogy – in the above case: e.g. human mouth, clam, etc.
- symbiotic analogy – using recognised images, e.g. Ali Baba’s cave
- fantasy analogy – wish-fulfilment, in a ideal world, how would the bottle be closed?
Developed by Genrich Altshuller in 1946; It is derived from studying the best solutions to problems including millions of successful designs and patents to distil from them the secrets of innovation.
TRIZ research began with the hypothesis that there are universal principles of invention that are the basis for creative innovations that advance technology, and that if these principles could be identified and codified, they could be taught to people to make the process of invention more predictable. The research has proceeded in several stages over the last 50 years. Over 2 million patents have been examined, classified by level of inventiveness, and analyzed to look for principles of innovation. The three primary findings of this research are as follows:
- Problems and solutions were repeated across industries and sciences
- Patterns of technical evolution were repeated across industries and sciences
- Innovations used scientific effects outside the field where they were developed