Creativity & innovation

Creativity and innovation is the key to survive in competitive world. There are organizations which are establishing their innovation centers in India. In fact professional companies are focusing on sustainability and trying to introduce green products. It requires innovation. These both words are the buzz words now a day. In manufacturing companies innovation is more relevant in term of product development. However, for being successful professional, you need to find out creative ways to engage your audience and customer.

What led Edison to light up our lives? What allowed DaVinci to accomplish so much in such different fields? How was Gates able to develop the Windows program? How can we be more creative and innovative? We can do it by learning to cultivate our creativity, another key success factor.

Creativity is the ability to generate ideas, to see opportunities where others see only problems, to break out of the limiting boxes of our traditional way of thinking and to do something more original, quick, effective, profitable, aesthetic, functional, practical, productive or ecological. Innovation is the ability to transform these ideas into goods, products and services that meet the needs of a specific market; our challenge is to become creative and innovative.

It’s not just for artists. Although creativity is considered a quality related mostly with the arts and culture due to its obvious connection with painting, sculpture, writing and drama, this skill is also crucial in the business, academic and political sectors. Everyone needs a certain amount of creativity to succeed.

To be creative, we do not need to be geniuses. Creativity is within reach for all of us.

We first need to prepare ourselves. We must have the knowledge, attitudes and skills required to be creative. We must know how to generate ideas and must have the desire to generate them, demonstrating that desire when we encounter a problem or a conflict situation.

We can be creative at home, in decorating our houses, preparing a new dish, designing spaces or organizing activities for our families. We can be creative at work, generating new procedures, new ways of doing things, new products or new services. We can be creative in society, finding better ways to live together, finding original solutions to problems that arise in our community.

Break out of the Box

Here are some of the ways from creativity experts:

• Take a course or workshop on creativity. Learn what motivates you to want to be creative.
• Change your normal daily routine to stimulate mental, emotional and physical flexibility.
• Use colors and images in your note-taking and communications. Colors and figures stimulate your imaginative mental processes. Use the mind map technique to generate ideas.
• When you encounter a problem, ask yourself, “What is the solution that I am not seeing?”
• Ask others. People who are outside a critical situation can usually see things that we don’t, so they are able to see alternate solutions.
• Play another role. How would you solve this problem if you were a homemaker, an investigator, a mechanic, a pilot, or a doctor? Changing your role forces you to think in a different way and to consider new options.
• Learn to play. Play establishes the mental and emotional conditions needed to produce ideas.
• We have defined creativity as a skill that can be learned. We have seen that creativity is not only for artists, but also for educators, business people and executives. We have learned how to initiate the simple, but effective process of basically exercising our creativity. Now we only need the humility to learn more about this magic function of the brain and the courage to dare to act