Tina Seelig teaches on creativity and innovation at Stanford University. The book’s title, inGenius, reflects her belief that everybody has an innate creative genius.
The Innovation Engine is Seelig’s proposed method to optimise internal and external factors toward ingenuity. Three internal factors in the Innovation Engine are knowledge, imagination, and attitude. Three external factors in the Innovation Engine are resources, habitat, and culture. What you know fuels your imagination, which is the ability to create something new. Your attitude will determine how you respond to challenges. Resources are the things of value in your environment, habitat the spaces which reflect your imagination, and culture the way the groups you belong to understand the world. These six attributes are interconnected in the Innovation Engine.
Creativity is a renewable resource. Not many of us have been trained to stretch our imagination, but this should be an imperative, for with increased imagination we will see solutions rather than problems. Important tools for increasing your imagination include reframing the problem, asking the ‘why’ of the problem, and cultivating the ability to connect non-obvious ideas. Cross-pollination and blending ideas comes from interacting with others in the forms of observation, receiving advice, or collaboration. Using metaphors and analogies can be a good way of connecting things.
Ideas come in waves. The first set of waves is not usually the best. It is the most obvious, so don’t just take the first solution you come up with. The second set of waves will be more interesting, but the third set will be even more creative. You need to find ways to get to the third set of waves and beyond. Brainstorming a helpful way to develop your imagination, but it needs to be done well. This means considering what the room looks like, who will participate, what questions will you pose, and whether everyone has a pad of sticky notes or paper and something to write with. Keep in mind that the people who implement the ideas are not always the people who come up with the ideas. Observation is key to innovation as it fuels your imagination. This is a skill that can be built up. Beyond simply observing, you have to find a way to capture the observations, for example in photographs, dancing, writing, or painting. Attitude is important for creativity and innovation. If you think you’re creative, you’re more likely to be so. If you don’t think there is a solution to be found, you’re unlikely to look for it. Innovators don’t wait until conditions are perfect, and they have all the parts they think they need at their disposal. They see the potential in what resources they have. Creativity is not simply intellectual, but also emotional, and you can use strong emotions to catalyse your creative ideas.
There are different types of spaces in real and online life. These spaces have an impact our ability to create, and the creative space should be designed to maximise team work and creativity. This includes considering the colour of the walls, what is seen out of the window, and what music you play. It is important to bring play into the creative space, and to consider the people who are inside the space and how they connect with each other. A lot of creative work is done in teams, but we are usually not educated about how to work with others. One tool which can be used to prepare people for teamwork is Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’. Everyone brings something different to the team, and differences need to be respected, and conflicts managed. Play and positive feedback is also necessary for team work.
Putting constraints — such as time, money, competition, space, or people — on a project can lead to higher creative output, as it forces people to be thoughtful and to prioritise. When people experience low pressure and high creativity, they are on an expedition. When they experience low pressure and low creativity, they feel they are on autopilot. When they experience high pressure and low creativity, they feel they are on a treadmill. And when they experience high pressure and high creativity, they feel they are on a mission. Rules and rewards should be used to encourage innovation, but be sure the rules you put in place enhance rather than inhibit innovation. Creativity is an experiment, and uncertainty and potential surprise shouldn’t be avoided as these can not only enhance engagement, they are necessary to the creative process. Even if something is a failure, rewarding the effort will encourage more exploration. You can’t be risk-averse, and people should not be penalised for failed experiments. If you are throwing away a lot of experiments, it shows you are generating a lot of creative ideas. You need to create an environment in which experimentation is encouraged.
For Tina Seelig’s webpage click here. Seelig’s presentations on ‘How to catch luck’, ’The 6 characteristics of truly creative people’, and ‘A crash course in creativity with more than 44,000 students’ are embedded in the page, and you will find links to the podcasts ‘Leap!’ and ‘Stanford Innovation Lab’, and to Seelig’s blog.
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