Tag: creativity
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The Village Grows: Considering the Community of Creative Practitioners
Knowinnovation’s origin story can be traced back to the CPSI community. KI was born out of the need to adapt the tenets of creative problem-solving to interdisciplinary science. What’s more, KI has given birth to a few offspring of its own: Innovation Bound, which takes the KI approach into the corporate world, and Inclusive Innovation,…
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The Language of Creativity
Every type of science has a robust language of its own, rife with acronyms and jargon that make for efficient communication amongst peers within the field but can be confusing, misleading or off-putting to people from other disciplines. This raises our attention to the fact of how much we rely on language to convey meaning,…
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Tolerating Ambiguity
It‘s usually in a moment of feeling blocked or stalled that there’s a fierce temptation to seize the nearest reasonable solution. This is when we need a tolerance for ambiguity. It means staying in uncertainty, or staying with the question, despite the discomfort of not knowing the answer, or not knowing where we’re headed. It…
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Just Say Yes
The KI method depends on a unique skill that scientists may be unaccustomed to: deferring judgment. It is the capacity to set aside your opinions temporarily and accept a new or odd idea and take the time to develop it before dismissing it. If you can overlook the flaws of a suggestion and play with…
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Frugal Innovation
Scarcity can be a major driver for innovation. A bleak economy can thrust companies, organizations, universities – and entire countries – into an austerity mode. In the context of a changing economy when it seems everything has to be faster, better and cheaper, there’s a type of innovator who’s thriving: the jugaad innovator. Jugaad is…
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Be Deliberate
Creative ideas sometimes come as a surprise, but they don’t have to be an accident. Instead of waiting for good ideas to arrive at random or by luck; we can hunt them down. When you use a creative process – whether it’s for a short meeting, a 2-day or week-long workshop or a 3-year project…
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The Productive Dissident
Deviance has an important place in the innovative process. We don’t challenge norms without a little (or a lot) of deviant thinking. And the single best way to discourage inventive, out-of-the-box deviance is to prohibit disagreement and probing questions. We need a little clarifying, critical judgment now and then. The trick is to cultivate a…
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Equating Procrastination
A skilled procrastinator can be highly innovative, inventing all sorts of reasons not to do something, conceiving clever excuses to delay starting or not to have finished. If you have to rely on someone who’s expert at this kind of delaying, it can be maddening. If you’re the procrastinator putting off your own projects, it…
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Defining Brainstorming
In 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming individually was more effective than brainstorming in a group, but it was widely misinterpreted as “brainstorming didn’t work.” The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and…
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Another Brainstorming
If it’s a productive brainstorming session, it can give the participants a real sense of accomplishment and group ownership of an idea, which can only enhance the sense of team – much moreso than a rigged teambuilding event. If the session if lively and humorous, the laughter reduces stress and creates a good working climate.…
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Innovate this Week
World Creativity and Innovation Week has been happening since April of 2001, and is meant, according to co-founder Marci Segal, “to help people celebrate their capacity to use their creativity to make the world a better place, and to make their place in the world better, too.” There are events this week in Canada, the…