Tag: Innovation

Creativity, Ideas, Innovation, Leadership

6 Ways to Solve Difficult Problems

Lately, I have been talking a lot about how to be creative on demand. I have shared my learning and insights with my colleagues, students, startups, leaders and creative professionals. This is one of the most fundamental abilities that we need to master if we want to do really well in our professional and sometimes personal lives. You can watch the recording of one of these sessions here. I have also shared my perspectives on “Where creative ideas come from” in earlier blog posts as well. So, the question then is why another blog post about the same topic? That’s […]

Ideas, Innovation, Personal Growth

Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective Taking

Just finished reading by Hank Barnes on Gartner’s blog where he talks about his pet peeves with the B2B world and I quote My biggest pet peeve is that the B2B world has DEVOLVED to  a world where three things don’t seem to be valued anymore – Hank Barnes (On the Gartner blog) The three things that he mentions are “Intellectual Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Perspective taking”. While he talks from the perspective of Businesses dealing with other Businesses, I reckon, these are true for each and everyone of us and in every sphere of life – both personal and professional. While […]

Creativity, Ideas

Where do Ideas Come from?

I was recently speaking to a group of students about how can we learn to be creative on-demand and was asked this question. The student asked is there a way we can categorise all the different ways we can come up with a creative idea. This is another way of asking – Where do Ideas come from? I have written about this in the past here, here, here and here. There are multiple different ways to look at this question from. One way is to look at this from the lens that Steven Johnson wrote about in his best selling […]

Ideas, Innovation

A Prime Example of Human Creativity, Ingenuity and Resilience

I came across this music video that made me sit up and brought a big, wide, smile. Watch it first here. https://vimeo.com/412337478 This is a prime example of what happens when you bring together people who are willing to test boundaries, explore, stay curious and above all want to express themselves. The choreography, music, the interaction between the panes is simple yet comes alive.   Who said that you can’t make music videos when you are physically distanced. Nothing needs to and will stop because of the physical distancing that the pandemic has created.   Here is another example of […]

Innovation

You Can’t Innovate when

You don’t know what problem you are solving, and for whom You want the innovation project to go strictly according to plan You don’t have a team which is diverse and engaged You don’t use an innovation framework (any framework would do) The team is not given the tools, training, time and a teacher You’re afraid to make a mistake You’re responsible to innovate but never have the authority (budgets or access) needed to innovate There is no significant insight that is driving the project The team is afraid of calling out if and when “the emperor is naked” There […]