For many students, summer is the time for internships and summer jobs, and it is also a great time to focus on your creative thinking and imaginative abilities so that you will be in good shape after graduation to get that dream job.
Everyone says that modern businesses value creative thinking and innovation highly, even those that are most common to work for. The question is, how can you be imaginative without struggling, looking dumb or repeating a hundred times what others have already proposed?
I have been talking to different startups for the last few years and have learned several fascinating innovation recipes. Here are six ways of developing your own skills in innovative thinking and creativity ...
- Build your own “Three Ifs”
In order to twist the very concept of it to make it different, many good innovators take an existing object to ask clever questions. Steve Jobs didn't begin with the smartphone concept. He just took an existing mobile phone and asked a very basic question: how can we upgrade it to make it better or the best?
Let's be clear about this: there are no universal innovation recipes, and depending on specialty, interest, way of thought, or even the way of team he / she is involved in, each person can develop his or her own approach.
"Having said that, I typically recommend that my students construct innovative thinking around three" ifs:
(1) What if I change it (the object / system / social relationship, etc)? What will happen?
(2) If I were to use it in 10 years, what would I change or develop with respect to this item?
(3) If I had a one-million-dollar investment to boost it, what would I do?
Such questions can become important instruments that can assist you to think differently. By repeatedly using the "three ifs" formula (or creating your own collection of questions) about all sorts of items, it is important to practice these skills. And there will be several new ideas coming up.
For starters, I kept asking my students for several semesters, let 's take a bicycle, think about it and ask the "three if" questions, so we can come up with a new idea. The students initially strongly opposed, and they were very critical. Nevertheless, they started to come up with several new innovative ideas after many rounds of discussions and brainstorming. In order to incorporate their innovative concepts, we narrowed down those inventions into small course projects and my student teams received multiple cash awards.
- Dreaming Practice
The biggest paradox is that imaginative thought through the proverbial apple falling on your head is not inherently the result of IQ or enlightenment. It is a matter of training your imagination daily, exercising your observational and dreaming powers, big or small. It sounds so basic, and yet this important element is often missing from our daily lives in this age of information overload and highly charged urban life.
Far too often, we remain focused on the main task at hand, devoting our mental powers to repetitive acts (including Twitter and SMS-well, I'm still guilty of this sometimes), so that the most imaginative concept we can come up with at the end of the day is just to eventually take a break in front of the TV or computer screen. A familiar sound?
Whatever you do, whether it's work or leisure, practice spending time applying the formula of "three ifs" to whatever you see or imagine. This will help you get into the habit of making room for dreaming in your mind, which is important for creative thinking and creativity.
- Allow time for innovative thinking that is coherent
The value of setting aside a specifically defined period for creative thinking and innovation is reiterated in every creativity textbook. Google asks the teams, for instance, to devote at least 20% of their time to innovative thinking or new ventures. But then, even though we wake up ready to reinvent, there's always something that doesn't fit and new ideas like popcorn don't pop up. This stalemate has two explanations for that. The first is that we don't practice dreaming, and the second is that we don't concentrate on coherent thoughts in practice.
The next rule of creative thinking is therefore very simple: assign time to practice creative thinking about something particular, which may be an hour a day or a week. A colleague told me that he began to think about cell phones when he was a student several years ago. What they will be in 10 and 20 years. His essays on this subject have already gained much praise at college, and he got a cool job after college developing phone apps to make them much smarter and more appealing for millennials.
- Learn (in an elevator) to pitch your ideas
The fact that Apple's Steve Jobs was great at exploring and describing technologies focused on existing products-laptops , mobile phones, music players-is a simple reality. He did not invent certain goods, but he improved them, and he was great at explaining why his version was superior to other competing goods.
I hear from my students on many occasions, "But first I had that idea" or "I just recently suggested something like that and nobody listened to me." I always highlight the bottom line in this situation. You probably had a great idea, but you didn't express yourself clearly and excitingly enough to attract the attention of people or help others to understand the nature of your innovation or project.
There is an old saying, "If in three sentences you do not communicate your idea, you don't have an idea!" The ability to give a very brief and concise explanation of a new concept (two to three words, such as yelling through an elevator's closing door) and to make a quick presentation (two to three minutes, what is called a "elevator pitch") is one of the most critical creativity skills. The ability to articulate in this way can only come from a great deal of practice, like any other ability.
- Bounce feelings off others
"Even a great innovator needs individuals around her or him to explore new innovative ideas and developments or" bounce. From Microsoft (well, when it was young) to Google, what do the big creative ideas of our time have in common? All of them were created by teams of individuals who stayed together to conceive the idea, plan their creative projects, take them to investors and the public, and, most importantly, brainstorm those innovations within the team together-bouncing ideas, questions and improvements until the product was perfected to become the next 'eureka' multi-billion dollar.
Therefore, the ability to be a valuable team member, capable of bouncing concepts to the next level, is a final significant asset to add to your creativity ability. This is very common for some young people, while becoming a team player does not come so naturally for others. But in this style of interaction, it's never too late to train yourself.