Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking 2382 516Share Synopsis Aspects of creative thinking that are not usually taught. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. And, finally, Creativity is paradoxical. Tags: adversity, contemporaries, creative education, creative geniuses, creative life, creative thinker, creative thinking, education, lighting systems, masterpieces, minor poets, motions, picasso, practicality, profitability, rembrandt, self-help, shakespeare, sonnets, special person, symphonies, thomas edison, wolfgang amadeus mozart A Wandering Mind Is an Intelligent Mind What's the Latest Development? Resent research suggests that mind wandering is associated with good working memory, itself a measure of intelligence, reading comprehension and IQ score. The new study, published in Psychological Science, asked individuals to perform routine tasks and monitored how often their minds wandered. Later, scientists measured each person's working memory and found that people with better memories were also more likely to have a roaming mind. The results are the first indication that memory may enable off-topic thoughts. What's the Big Idea? Despite humans' proclivity for self-conscious and intentional behavior, scientists estimate that our minds wander about half the time, demonstrating the complex behavior and purpose of our brain. Photo credit: shutterstock.com
Free Private Group Chat, Video Chat, File Sharing - War Room | Hall.com Boost Creativity: 7 Unusual Psychological Techniques Looking for the last piece of the puzzle? Try these 7 research-based techniques for increasing creativity. Everyone is creative: we can all innovate given time, freedom, autonomy, experience to draw on, perhaps a role model to emulate and the motivation to get on with it. But there are times when even the most creative person gets bored, starts going round in circles, or hits a cul-de-sac. So here are 7 unusual creativity boosters that research has shown will increase creativity: 1. People often recommend physical separation from creative impasses by taking a break, but psychological distance can be just as useful. Participants in one study who were primed to think about the source of a task as distant, solved twice as many insight problems as those primed with proximity to the task (Jia et al., 2009). ◊ For insight: Try imagining your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location. 2. Like psychological distance, chronological distance can also boost creativity. 3. 4.
Making Sense of Minimum Viable Products Minimum Viable Products–what does this mean? If you read any article or listen to any talk about minimum viable products, you will notice that the word “confusion” shows up early and often: Steve Blank: “This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the ’minimum’ part is the goal. Or worse, that every potential customer should want it.” It’s not just that the concept is confusing. MVPs are born from confusion: the “extreme uncertainty” that Ries defines as a fundamental condition of a startup. Making Sense of MVPs Rather than trying to definitively make sense out of MVPs, I stress that “making sense” is what MVPs are about: MVPs are mechanisms to create meaning where little or none currently exists. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually a product in the traditional sense. What is a meaningful set of features for customers? Meaning as visionMeaning as learningMeaning as method Meaning as Vision Meaning as Learning Final Thought
NeighborGoods Is a more disorganized brain a more creative brain In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson posits that “the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are” in reference to the results of a neuroscience experiment by Robert Thatcher. Across the board, in Johnson’s book and other sources it seems pretty clear that creativity is messy. Ideas need to be sloshing around or crashing in to one another to produce breakthroughs: Johnson cites research showing that the volume of ideas bouncing about make large cities disproportionately more creative than smaller towns.Having multiple hobbies allows your brain to subconsciously compare and contrast problems and solutions, forming new connections at the margins of each.Similarly, reading multiple books at the same time vs serially lets your brain juxtapose new ideas and develop new connections.Wandering minds are more creative.Studying a field “too much” doesn’t limit creativity — it does the opposite. At the end of his book Johnson recommends: Tags:
Innovation's Hidden Enemies - Alessandro Di Fiore by Alessandro Di Fiore | 10:12 AM April 22, 2011 Companies the world over find it tough to turn good ideas into great businesses. That’s partly because, as we all know, organizations and cultures rebel against innovations, especially when they are first conceived. Companies that can protect ideas in their early years usually have a better chance of success. Take the Vevey-headquartered Nestle, for example, whose Nespresso has become Europe’s leading coffee brand by packing a variety of high quality coffees in aluminum capsules that can be used only with the company’s three types of coffee machines. Executives had to vanquish three hidden enemies that surfaced before the concept could see the light of day and become the Swiss company’s fastest growing new business in the 2000s. Nespresso took off when it stopped targeting offices and started marketing itself to households. Another enemy Nespresso faced was the incumbent business model.
After a Year, Startup America Has a Start Courtesy Startup America.Scott Case (hands raised) and Steve Case celebrate Startup America. Start The adventure of new ventures. It’s been a year since business leaders gathered at the White House to kick off the Startup America Partnership, a national nonprofit initiative intended to spur the growth of new companies, with the end goal of creating jobs. What has happened in 12 months? The answer, so far, is a bit of both. But its chairman, Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL, and its chief executive, Scott Case, a co-founder of Priceline who is not related to Steve Case, have been promoting the importance of entrepreneurs while building their program’s infrastructure. • Startup America has joined with big companies like Dell, Facebook, Ernst & Young, Google and Microsoft. • Startup America has also begun recruiting members. So far, 3,800 start-ups have signed on. I spoke recently with Scott Case about the past year, what Startup America’s offerings mean for new companies, and what comes next.