Creativity

Picture this: you are a  hard working onion and turnips farmer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and you feel that you should be selling your farm produce in the most expedient manner.

However, commodity traders and markets are not giving you the best price, and eventual consumers pay through the roof what you sold so cheaply that you feel cheated. What do you do? Forming a cooperative as part of producer protection is one thing you can do but what else? Here’s how poor farmers in Africa have employed ingenuity and innovation. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught within the bounds of where an accepted solution “should” come from.  We need to look a the tools that we are given,  and get creative not just with the solution, but with the tools themselves.

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen.  The story goes like this: Read the rest of this entry »

A colleague wrote to me today.

I wanted to bounce a premise off you. The Ad Club asked me to lead a workshop in December around a topic. I proposed “Better Brainstorming in Today’s Idea Economy.”

What I like is that brainstorming is something everyone takes for granted and something everyone believes they’re good at. But as we know, there are good sessions and bad sessions. If you had to list the top 3-5 factors in successful brainstorming sessions, what would they be?

I gave my friend my first-thing-in-the-morning, top-of-my-head response. I’ve polished it up a bit and it’s below. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes someone comes up with something that makes everyone else think “Why didn’t I think of that ?”

Have you ever outpaced cars and been honked at? Had a car almost wipe you out while making a turn? Do you ever ride your bike so fast that you wish that everyone else could know how close to the speed of light you were? Or sometimes are you riding your bike, cars honking impatiently behind you, wishing that they knew you were actually going more than 10 mph? Or maybe you just want to show off to your buddies that you left in your dust!

Enter… the speed vest! Read the rest of this entry »

Man borrows a lot from nature in his application of technology, like when the bat provided inspiration for sonar - a system using transmitted and reflected underwater sound waves to detect and locate submerged objects or measure the distance to the floor of a body of water.

Bionic engineers are specialists in translating nature’s solutions into human technology and attempt to answer questions such as why nocturnal animals like bats which are known to be blind can adapt to use echolocation by which they navigate and hunt prey.

Daimler AG, the automotive manufacturer that claims to act responsibly towards society and the environment and to shape the future of safe and sustainable mobility with groundbreaking technologies, too use bionics to design their top-end cars.

Read the rest of this entry »

At one time, Microsoft employers asked prospective employees questions like, “Why are sewer lids round?” The idea was not so much to see if a candidate knew the answer, but to see how he or she would go about developing an answer.

I have used the sewer lid question in creativity training sessions. The results have ranged from enlightening to appalling. Some participants brim with suggestions, others stare in blank disinterest. There are many reasonable answers to whey sewer lids are round, some more fitting than others. But all creative people begin formulating suggestions immediately, fluently, and with gusto.

After a set up like that, how can you not begin to offer answers?

Peter Lloyd writes Right Brain Workouts for IdeaConnection.

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the most elegant invention or innovation of the past few centuries? I challenge anyone to beat the two I put at the top of my list. Before I reveal them, let me set what I think makes an innovation elegant. Read the rest of this entry »

We can’t make great decisions and create value if we don’t know what is happening. I just took the following ‘Is this smile genuine’ test: try it. They have 20 15 second videos of fake and genuine smiles.

Most of what we believe is not true. Communication, collaboration, contact, is happening when we look and listen without history, without fear. Here we’ll talk about the chaotic now; the interface between what was, and what is being created. It is fun to be comfortable in chaos, It is empowering to allow new gestalts to form. It is profitable to create based on what is going down NOW. Enjoy this new blog.