Skill at discovering new ideas, and delivering them, may be one of the most important practical job skills, in today’s and tomorrow’s job market. Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. This course aims to empower individuals who believe they have lost their innate creativity, because they, their employers or teachers prefer the three R's: replication, repetition and rote, to innovation. We show how to re-ignite rusty creative powers. During this course, you will learn proven tools, frameworks and concepts useful for discovery– generating an endless stream of new ideas implementing at least some of those ideas with skill and persistence, based on books and articles written by the instructors. In the first part of the course, you will learn a proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’ that makes creativity more accessible to everyone. In the following weeks, you will learn practical proven tools useful for delivering ideas by employing the basic principles of business and management. You will practice the method, use it to tackle challenging real-world needs and produce a 2-3 minutes video presenting your idea. Course Learning Outcomes On successfully completing this four-week course, you will be able to: - Manage a process to generate an unending stream of creative ideas - Lead a process of innovation and implement ideas through all phases from discovery to delivery. - Apply creativity to a wide range of strategic management issues. - Solve problems with a high degree of innovation, creative thinking and risk taking. - Use and apply proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’. - Develop and implement an innovation in your own practice. - Identify new and unfamiliar challenges and reflect on these challenges from a creative point of view, action they require and service they provide. - Demonstrate creative problem solving skills for defining, structuring and solving real world operations management problems.
How to build your creativity ‘muscles’
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From the course by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Cracking the Creativity Code: Discovering Ideas
189 ratings
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
189 ratings
Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Startup Entrepreneurship
From the lesson
What is Creativity?
Meet the Instructors
Prof. (Emeritus) Shlomo MaitalProf. Shlomo Maital Sr. Research Fellow, S. Neaman Institute, Technion
Industrial Engineering
Hello, welcome back.
This is session nine, next to the last session in our first week together and
our theme in this session is how to build your creativity muscles.
I like to work out.
Some of my work out involves weights.
Using the weights strengthens my muscles, keeps them in tone.
The brain is kind of like a muscle, and if you work it out it gets stronger.
If you work it out, it gets more creative.
So, I'm going to give you some tips about how to build your creativity muscles and
how to exercise your brain.
This is found in our book in the chapter six called Building
your Creativity Muscles.
10 plus 1 exercises for heavy lifting change the world innovators.
Let's go on and learn some of these ten activity
exercises, creativity exercises.
The first five.
First one, maybe the most important.
All of us see things around us everyday, all the time, that we dislike.
Bad service, impolite people, unthoughtful people, things that don't work well,
things that are badly designed.
We all see this.
And it's good to sharpen your vision to see this around you all the time and
look for these places where you can create value.
And then think about how could this be improved.
Now, once in a while, sometimes, we need to act on what we see.
Maybe not always.
If you have a lot of ideas you can't implement all of them, but
you can implement some of them and you need to implement some of them just
to practice using your ideas and making them happen rather than just saying them.
It may be no more than writing a letter, writing an email,
calling somebody, bringing something to somebody's attention.
But at least some of the time, act, don't just gripe.
Second, some of the stories I told you earlier, about zoom-in zoom-out.
They're really about breaking the rules,
like the restaurant when you ate in total darkness.
And the assumption is that you have to see your food, and
part of restaurant's ambiance is to present the food beautifully.
What if you can't see it at all?
That's breaking the rules.
Break the rules.
Innovation is breaking the rules, but
intelligently that means you have to learn the rules first, master the rules.
And then think to yourself, what if people ate in total darkness.
And some of these ideas are a wild and wooly and weird.
But sometimes they really do work and they really do create value in unexpected ways.
So learn the rules, write down the rules, and then break the rules and
later, perhaps, we'll talk a bit about how you can do that in a systematic way using
a method by management consultant named Peter Ruckert, the late Peter Ruckert.
Three, change your habits.
Get out of your comfort zone.
So, we're all creatures of habit, we need to be because if you had to think about
every single thing that we did and chose that would be pretty tiresome.
So we usually do the same thing today that we did yesterday and
that keeps us from having to think too much about these minor decisions.
The problem with that is that we can become stuck in our habits.
We can become comfortable in the familiar.
And we need to become comfortable in being uncomfortable, in the unfamiliar.
So change your habits, try new things.
Try to become comfortable with being temporarily uncomfortable.
And then when you come to develop new ideas, you may be more welcoming for
these new ideas that somehow make you feel a bit uncomfortable.
Change your habits.
I ask my students during my week's course with them and
I'm asking you as well in our four weeks together.
Please do things differently than you usually do.
Change your habits.
See if that helps you exercise your creativity muscles.
Exercise four, develop resilience, embrace failure.
As we said before,
creativity is risky because sometimes the things you create don't work.
They don't create value.
Now we need to become resilient.
We need to be able to bounce back from working on ideas, sometimes,
for a long time.
Sometimes investing our hard earned savings.
We need to bounce back from failures, and learn from them.
And go on and simply get up and try again.
Develop your resistance, develop your resilience.
This is one of the reasons that I've run two marathons, Boston and New York.
Simply to persist in something that's pretty hard and
see it to the end and cross that finish line.
Explore dark corners, experiment everywhere.
So, the point here is that creativity is not just about inventing gadgets.
Creativity is about widening the range of choice in everything, everywhere,
all the time in everything that we do and the way we do it.
Explore dark corners, and
try to think about new ways, creative ways to do things in everything that you do.
From brushing your teeth to tying your shoes.
To getting dressed and watching television and
listening to music and doing your email.
Experiment, try things, [COUGH] experiment everywhere.
Learn to focus.
Focus is really, really important.
Set yourself a goal, focus on that goal, and
single-mindedly learn to implement ideas that you've come up with.
Focus is really important because creative people sometimes have so
many ideas that they are distracted and they skip from one to another.
When you implement an idea, just focus on that idea.
Use your microscope, zoom in on it,
and implement it with great persistence and focus.
Grow your persistence.
There are many stories in the world of startups that are launched,
they have a great idea, and they're on the verge of a breakthrough and great success.
But they run out of money, people get tired, people despair.
It's very easy to despair when you're trying to implement a radical innovation.
Grow your persistence.
Develop ways of simply sticking to something, and
seeing it through to the end, achieving your goal.
This is a very important part of changing the world,
because if you have a truly creative idea, you will encounter major resistance.
As people will be uncomfortable with radically new things and
sometimes you have to be rather stubborn, or really stubborn, to see it through.
Practice your persistence.
Make sure that you do what you say you're going to do in small things and
then you'll be better able to do it in large things.
Hear, listen, and teach, the eighth creativity exercise.
There's a wonderful movie recently about Yves Saint Laurent, French movie.
Yves Saint Laurent was a designer.
He changed the world with his designs.
And he got his ideas from walking the streets,
as we recount in chapter six about building your creativity muscles.
He walked the streets, he observed people, and he broke the rules.
So, for example, my job as a couturiere,
he once told the New York Times is to make clothes that reflect their times,
I'm convinced women want to wear pants and he invented the pants suit.
Until he came along, pants were not a fashion item for women and after that
they were and they're very comfortable for women, especially working women.
So, hear, listen, teach.
Observe what people need.
Nobody came to him and said, we want to wear pants, but
he made them beautiful and they became successful.
Hear, listen, observe and
then teach, explain what you're doing and create value.
Johnny Cash, I have a story about Johnny Cash.
He was a famous country singer, American country singer.
My favorite Johnny Cash song is about Folsom Prison.
He wrote a song about people in a real hardcore,
tough federal penitentiary in Folsom.
And he wrote the song about somebody in jail,
listening to the sounds outside, and wondering about where he went wrong.
Johnny Cash listened to the pain and
the experiences of people who listened to his music.
Instead of being a pampered, wealthy country singer star,
he was somebody who identified with ordinary people.
And their suffering, their pain, their mistakes, their slip ups and
expressed that in his songs.
Individualize, it's always personal.
This is a really important lesson about creativity.
If you want to do market research, I can tell you one of the best places to begin.
Inside yourself.
If there's something that you need, that you would like to have and
it doesn't exist.
Because many other people are like us.
Chances are others would want the same thing.
So begin with your own need, your own self.
Make creativity personal.
I would like to have this, and
I'm going to make it happen and then share it with other people.
This is a memory stick.
All of you have these.
The memory stick was invented by an Israeli entrepreneur named Dov Moran.
And Dov Moran invented it because he needed it.
He needed it because in 1985 he was making a presentation
in New York City with a laptop, and he forgot to plug the laptop in.
Laptops then had very short battery lives, and
the laptop died and he lost his presentation, and
he decided at that moment, I will never again be without backup.
And he invented the memory stick or the disk on key,
as it was called in my country, and the rest is history.
The whole world walks around with these things.
Make creativity personal.
Come up with things that you would like to have.
And finally, the last message, or rather strange one, become who you are.
We began this session this week.
We began it with saying you need to look inside yourself, what are your passions?
Begin with why.
Become who you are.
Join yourself, explore your passions and then use your creativity.
Exercise your creativity to explore and express who you are,
your passions, your desire to change the world and to help other people.
And there's a 10 plus 1.
That's the last exercise, the 11th brain exercise.
We want you to have two instruments.
One of them is a microscope, a microscope is something enables you to see
the smallest details of a problem, or a challenge you're focusing on.
So, develop your microscope.
And then, we want you to have a telescope.
That's the zoom out part.
The telescope will help you zoom out to the entire world.
Zoom out and explore different ways of doing things.
Different options.
Widen the range of choice and
put everything you learned to your shopping basket.
In a later week, we're going to discuss how you actually do this and
how you do the zoom out with a telescope.
And then finally zoom in again.
So, great creative people, great entrepreneurs have excellent microscopes,
sharp vision to explore little details.
Understand problems and then they have great telescopes that zoom out for
the whole universe and collect ideas and then back to the zoom in again.
Zoom in, zoom out, our 11th exercise.
That ends Session #9, and in our next, and last Session 10,
we're going to wrap-up this week
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