Have you ever wondered why the answer to the problem that you have been trying to solve pops into your mind just as you are driving home, taking a shower or waiting in the queue at your local takeaway? The answer is that your Creative Right Brain has been thoughtfully working on the problem for you. So how does this happen when you have been wrestling with a particular conundrum all day? Although not completely physiologically correct there is a useful Left Brain/Right Brain model that we can use. The left side of our brains is logical, linear and provides
Modelling innovation culture using social media
I have my own unique model of Innovation which helps with obtaining 'buy in' and best of all, it leads to a method of measuring the capacity to innovate which is a much more sensitive measure than waiting for KPIs to change. I had been puzzling for a while about how to model the spread of Innovation and the transfer of knowledge as well as other issues such as communication and trust. Little did I know that I had already considered this without really understanding. Recently, I attended a talk by Dr Kelly Page of Cardiff University about New Media
Innovation – is there such a thing as best practice?
On many blogs and websites there is evidence of people asking for examples of best practice in Innovation and many (often poor) responses. The question is are those seeking an answer asking for the impossible and are those providing answers actually talking gibberish? I have no doubt that the pleas for help are genuine but do those behind them know what they are asking for (and even why)? Those seeking knowledge about Innovation often do so for four main reasons: They are stuck and want some (free) help to extract themselves from the mire They are thinking about Innovation and
The Morphological matrix
This is a form of random stimulation that can be used solo or in groups. It is ideal for generating ideas when you have an idea about WHAT you wish to do but not HOW you might go about doing it. If you were a TV producer you might ask the question “How might we go about creating a new soap opera?” To use this technique in such a case first create a table with ten rows labelled 0 – 9 and 4 columns initially numbered 1 to 4. Next perform the following steps: Label each column with a different
Building versus implementing Innovation systems
Like most people with websites I spend time analysing statistics from my website, especially the words and phrases that are typed into search engines such as Google and Yahoo. One of the most frequent phrases or sentences that crops up is ‘implementing an innovation system’ or ‘implementing innovation’. This is both puzzling and worrying. It would seem to be a good thing that people and businesses are searching for information regarding Innovation but they seem to be thinking that Innovation is a system to be implemented rather like a book keeping system and that there is a magic prescription that
When is Creativity not creative?
There have been (and there will continue to be) debates about what exactly is creativity and what it means to be creative. I remember having a discussion with some artists about being creative. Being artistic, they naturally thought of themselves as creative and were seen in a similar way by the general public. To be fair, their methods and output was, to say the least, alternative but I posed them the question “If you use the same method for each piece of art work you produce, are you being creative even if the output changes?” There is no real answer
