heuristiquement Thinkertoys’ 10 Tips to Become an Idea Person In an age where new ideas quickly becomes commodity, creativity is a must. It is creativity that continuously give us new ideas to keep us ahead in the competition. Regarding this, I recently found an interesting book: Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko. This book contains a lot of actionable ideas on how to become an idea person and get our creative juice flow. In chapter 2 of the book, Michalko gives us 10 tips to become an idea person which I find very useful and thought-provoking. Here are the summarized explanation of the 10 tips: 1. Set yourself an idea quota for a challenge you are working on, such as five new ideas every day for a week. 2. Fighter pilots say, “I’ve gone tone” when their radar locks onto a target. 3. Deliberately program changes into your daily life. For example: take a different route to work, change your working hours, make new friends, and read fiction if you normally read non-fiction. 4. Creative thinkers read to feed their minds new information and ideas. 5. 6.
6 Powerful Tools for Generating Ideas Have you ever experienced having no idea come to your mind when you need them? Such moments can be frustrating, especially if you have spent quite a lot of time to think and still get nothing. In such situations, getting external inputs to stimulate your mind is a good solution. They can break down your idea brick walls and make your creative juice flow again. Of course, not all kinds of external inputs are useful. There are tools that can help you get these diverse inputs and I will describe six such tools. Create connection between an input you get and the problem at hand. Without further ado, here are six tools you can use to break down your idea brick walls and generate ideas: 1. This is the only offline tool in this list. 2. StumbleUpon allows you to get random pages whenever you press the Stumble button in the toolbar. 3. TDBSpecialProjects Idea Generator is a three wheel tool that gives you random three-word phrases. 4. Another good inputs to feed your mind with are quotes. 5. 6.
Creative Idea Generator Category:Creativity Techniques This A to Z of Creativity and Innovation Techniques, provides an introduction to a range of tools and techniques for both idea generation (Creativity) and converting those ideas into reality (Innovation). Like most tools these techniques all have their good and bad points. I like to think of these creativity and innovation techniques as tools in a toolbox in much the same way as my toolbox at home for DIY. It has a saw, spanner, hammer, knife and all sorts of other things in it, they are all very useful, but you have to pick the right tool (creativity / Innovation technique) for each job. This site will try and provide a little guidance along with each tool to let you know whether it's best used for cutting paper or putting in nails. For the future, the aim is to also have sub-categories which will identify Techniques for; Problem Definition - including problem analysis, redifinition, and all aspects associated with defining the problem clearly. Subcategories
Main Page quotes and quotations from the wise on all matters creative Change happens, that is for sure, and not just in our modern, 21st century era. It seems that the stress of the new affects most people in every age. So the trick is not to resist it, but to go with it. See also action, business, the future, managing, progress*, resistance*, time, vision Quotes ‘If you don't like something, change it. — Maya Angelou ‘Change is in all things sweet.’ — Aristotle ‘Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.’ — Marcus Aurelius ‘Keep constantly in mind in how many things you yourself have witnessed changes already. ‘Observe constantly that all things take place by change.’ ‘We must change in order to survive.’ — Pearl Bailey ‘To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.’ — Henri Bergson ‘If the people don’t want to come out of the park, nobody’s going to stop them.’ — Yogi Berra ‘Those who have changed the universe have never done it by changing officials, but always by inspiring the people.’ — J.
Steal Like an Artist: Austin Kleon on Combinatorial Creativity by Maria Popova The genealogy of ideas, why everything is a remix, or what T.S. Eliot can teach us about creativity. UPDATE: Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist synthesizes his ideas on creativity and is absolutely fantastic. Austin Kleon is positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet. In this excellent talk from The Economist‘s Human Potential Summit, titled Steal Like an Artist, Kleon makes an articulate and compelling case for combinatorial creativity and the role of remix in the idea economy. Kleon, who has clearly seen Kirby Ferguson’s excellent Everything is a Remix, echoes the central premise of my own recent talk on networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity: Nothing is completely original. Amen. And even more in the vein of the Brain Pickings ethos, reminiscent of this favorite quote by iconic designer Paula Scher: We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera.
How To Find Startup Ideas – Wesley Tansey I recently have met a number of people who expressed how badly they wanted to do a startup but said they lacked any good ideas. I know that startup ideas are worthless, especially since I have lived through the dozens of iterations involved, first with EffectCheck and now with Curvio. Nevertheless, you need to start somewhere and that means you need an idea that sufficiently captivates you. Now, I could simply give these people a list of startup ideas, but for an idea to really stick in your mind enough that you’ll want to start a company around it, you need to come up with it yourself. I’ve come up with a brief collection of strategies that you can use to generate new ideas for startups: Repurpose Take a service or approach applied to one market, and apply it to another.Examples: Chill (Turntable.fm), Yammer (social networks for businesses) Digitize Take content or functionality that exists only in a legacy form and put it online or in an app.Examples: Dr. Automate Unify Componentize Connect
In The Quest For New Ideas, Can The Internet Replace Random Real-Life Discovery? What does Renaissance art have in common with a pencil? If you believe in knowledge through serendipitous discovery, then quite a lot. This week I was looking for a book on Renaissance art in the library. While walking through the stacks, Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, a book about the origins of the pencil, caught my eye. This was just the book to help with another project I am working on, one associated with business-related technology artifacts. What luck! Rewind one week. As more and more book sales move online, brick and mortar bookstores are stocking only the most popular titles, reducing our chance of stumbling across that random, fascinating book that you never would have looked for. And it’s not just me. So if the likelihood of chance encounters through paper decreases, where else can these serendipitous encounters occur? Online Serendipity At first glance, the possibility of encountering random information online seems small. What’s Next?
Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER SCAMPER is a technique you can use to spark your creativity and help you overcome any challenge you may be facing. In essence, SCAMPER is a general-purpose checklist with idea-spurring questions — which is both easy to use and surprisingly powerful. It was created by Bob Eberle in the early 70s, and it definitely stood the test of time. In this posting, I present a complete SCAMPER primer, along with two free creativity-boosting resources: a downloadable reference mind map and an online tool that generates random questions to get you out of a rut whenever you need. SCAMPER Primer SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. S = SubstituteC = CombineA = AdaptM = MagnifyP = Put to Other UsesE = Eliminate (or Minify)R = Rearrange (or Reverse) To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. Consider, for instance, the problem "How can I increase sales in my business?" Combine