3/6/2013

Creativity

Creativity
Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. Being creative is seeing the same thing as everybody else but thinking of something different

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Innovation
Perhaps derived from the words Inner & motivation ??? A burning desire to question the status quo Why? Why not? What if.? Focus is experimentation and achievement

Creativity & Innovation

Creativity the ability to develop new ideas and to discover new ways of looking at problems and opportunities Innovation the ability to apply creative solutions to those problems and opportunities to enhance or to enrich peoples lives. Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things.

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Creativity and the Entrepreneur

Creative ideas often arise when entrepreneurs look at something old and think something new and different Sometimes creativity involves generating something from nothing Entrepreneurship is the result of a disciplined, systematic process of applying creativity and innovation to needs and opportunities in the marketplace

Creativity and the Entrepreneur

Successful entrepreneurs come up with ideas and then find ways to make them work to solve a problem or to fill a need When developing creative solutions to modern problems, entrepreneurs must go beyond merely using whatever has worked in the past Successful entrepreneurs are those who are constantly pushing technological & economic boundaries forward Success even survival in this fiercely competitive, global environment requires entrepreneurs to tap their creativity (and that of their employee) constantly

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Creative Traits
Imagination Verbal Ability Conceptual Ability Ability to Reason Logically Ability to Think Rapidly Mental Flexibility Ability to Think Nontraditional

Personality Traits
Frequently take independent action Prefer working with minimal or no supervision Prefer variety and change Seek new challenges and experiences Enjoy risk-taking Desire praise & recognition Dislike failure Exhibit high energy levels

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BARRIERS TO CREATIVITY

Creativity blocks
Perceptual Emotional Cultural/environmental Intellectual/expressive

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Perceptual blocks
Stereotypes: seeing what is familiar Isolating the problem Delimiting the problem too closely Inability to have multiple views of the problem Saturation

Emotional blocks
Fear of mistakes Inability to tolerate ambiguity Premature judgment Inability to incubate Change as a problem or an addiction Relation between fantasy and reality

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Cultural and environmental blocks

Taboos (language usage, people interaction) Fantasy and reflections as marginal poor-valued activities Children can play, adults cannot Social pressure (remember your high school times?) Intuition is considered frivolous (too much emphasis on brain, no heart) Tradition is good (change is evil) Capitalism (money can fix anything)

Intellectual and expressive blocks

Language (visual, rhetoric, formal) Language as responsible for the wiring of your brain Language and it expressive boundaries Assumptions for free (remember the bounding box in the dots exercise?)

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Barriers to Creativity
Life in the fast lane
In an increasingly fast paced world, we dont make time for creative activities.

Keeping up with the competition:

Its getting harder to innovate, produce new ideas and communicate at this pace.

Can be overwhelming for many professionals because many of the standard we put in place actually limit creative ability and competitiveness.

Barriers to Creativity
Searching for the one right answer
there may be (and usually are) several right answers

Focusing on being logical

discourages the use of one the minds most powerful creations: intuition

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Barriers to Creativity
Blindly following the rules
Sometimes creativity depends on our ability to break the existing rules so that we can see new ways of doing things.

Constantly being practical

Imagining impractical answers to what if questions can be powerful stepping-stones to creative ideas.

Barriers to Creativity
Viewing play as frivolous
There is a close relationship between the haha of humor and the aha of discovery. A playful attitude is fundamental to creative thinking. Play gives us the opportunity to reinvent reality and to reformulate established ways of doing things. Children learn when they play, and so can entrepreneurs. Watch children playing and you will see them invent games, create new ways of looking at old things, and learn what works (and what doesnt) in their games.

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Barriers to Creativity
Becoming overly specialized
Creative thinkers tend to be explorers, searching for ideas outside their areas of specialty

Avoiding ambiguity
Ambiguity can be a powerful creative stimulus, it encourages us to think something different

Barriers to Creativity
Fearing looking foolish
Creative thinking is no place for conformity.

Fearing mistakes
Creative people realize that trying something new often leads to failure; however, they do not see failure as an end. It represents a learning experience on the way to success.

Believing that Im not creative

merely an excuse for inaction Everyone has within himself or herself the potential to be creative; not everyone will tap that potential, however.

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