What makes us creative at work?

HOW CAN I BE MORE INNOVATIVE?

Give this a try...

Necessity is the mother of invention.


Sometimes we're the most creative when faced with the urgent need to solve something.

1. Take calculated chances. Follow your instincts once in awhile.
2. Stop requiring that everything be done according to the way it has always been done - try doing it differently
3. Cross-fertilize ideas across disciplines - shift the perspectives and see things freshly
4. Experiment with inventive thinking
5. Let yourself feel inspired - and think of ways to inspire others
6. Play with ideas and people and put them into new contexts
7. According to Einstein "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

DIGITAL CREATIVE TOOLBAG

• The Implications Wheel
• Firdamatic
• Royalty-free Photography @ Veer
• Scribbler
• Flickr
• ImaginationCubed
• Infectious Photo Projects from PhotoMemes
• PlasticPilots

THE 10 MOST ENDURING IDEAS

1. EXECUTION (1,911 votes; 49.3 percent of the voters chose this concept). It's not your strategic choices that drive success, but how well you implement them.
2. THE LEARNING ORGANIZATION (1,807; 46.6 percent). A learning organization is one that is deliberately designed to encourage everyone in it to keep thinking, innovating, collaborating, talking candidly, improving their capabilities, making personal commitments to their collective future, and thereby increasing the firm's long-term competitive advantage.
3. CORPORATE VALUES (1,555; 40.1 percent). Companies that care about ethics, trust, citizenship, and even meaning and spirituality in the workplace (or that simply articulate their values carefully) perform better in the marketplace than companies that care just about "making money."
4. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (1,554; 40.1 percent). The cultivation of long-term relationships with customers, including awareness of their needs, leads to highly focused, capable companies that try to make consumers "part of the family."
5. DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY (1,513; 39.0 percent). As Clayton Christensen noted in The Innovator's Dilemma, technological innovation radically alters markets by undermining incumbent companies - which are vulnerable because their offerings are all tailored to the needs of their existing customers.
6. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT (1,432; 37.0 percent): You don't have to rely on "putting the right people in place." You can train all employees to be better choosers, better strategists, better managers, and in the end, better leaders.
7. ORGANIZATIONAL DNA (1,315; 33.9 percent): Leaders can design an organization's structures - incentives, decision rights, reporting relationships, and information flows - to induce high performance by aligning them with one another and the strategic goals of the enterprise.
8. STRATEGY BASED TRANSFORMATION (1,277; 33.0 percent): Beyond the "blank page" of reengineering, this is the redesign of processes and organizational structures, and the consequent cultural change, to fulfill the strategic goals of the enterprise. In an ideal universe, this would not even be a management concept, because, as one correspondent put it, "All company activities should be aligned to the enterprise strategy."
9. COMPLEXITY THEORY (1,187; 30.6 percent): Markets and businesses are complex systems that can't be controlled mechanistically, but their emergent order can sometimes be anticipated. An understanding of the ways that complex systems evolve can help managers intervene and act more effectively.
10. LEAN THINKING (1,183; 30.5 percent): This type of process and management innovation is exemplified by the Toyota production system. Employees use a heightened awareness of work flow and demand to cut waste, eliminate cost, boost quality, and customize mass production. Said one anonymous correspondent, "It combines with complexity theory, emergent behavior, wisdom of crowds, disruption, and agile thinking to extend into areas like R&D to redefine innovation practices. Management thinking will need to change to address these fertile intersections."

CREATIVE TECHNIQUES

resources to tickle your creativity

• Inspired by Dee Hock, the man who turned Visa into a top performing global company, The Chaordic Commons is pioneering new ways to organize based on the chaordic principle - the phase between chaos and order. With a library full of presentations, reading lists, projects, speeches.
• 200 different creativity techniques and tools to inspire you, challenge you, and encourage you to be more innovative.
• Dave Gray's Squidoo Lens: Visual Thinking School helps you use pictures to solve problems