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Have you noticed that noise - too much of it or the lack of it - impacts your creative thinking energy? When New & Improved's founders, Bob Eckert and Jonathan Vehar, wrote More Lightning, Less Thunder - How to Energize Innovation Teams they did most of the writing in coffee shops. They say it wasn't so much the caffeine (although some would beg to differ) as it was the energy of the space.
Continue reading "Free Creativity Booster! Caffeine optional." »
Unless you have been living on a deserted island, you probably have at least seen a picture of Google Glass. The view from these "glasses" promises to be amazing.
Don't take our word for it. Watch this video to see what it might be like to wear Google glass around town.
Continue reading "See what you would see wearing Google Glass" »
Dodge has released a couple of super-charged videos. Maybe they would not have been so tired if they had tried some "new and improved" thinking with their coffee.
And, no, not in a B-movie, horror flick kind of way (though that would make for great conversation at the next company barbecue…).
Our most basic survival behaviors are run by our brainstem. We call this part of our brain the “gator brain” because it is similar to the ENTIRE brain of the alligator. Now, an alligator’s existence is a pretty basic thing: find food, protect your territory, protect yourself, and reproduce (…no, we’re not gonna touch that with a ten-foot pole…). Animals, which have evolved in a particular environmental niche, regard anything that is a change in that niche as a threat to their very existence. Less complex animals, like reptiles, have four choices in terms of how they might deal with that “newness”: kill it, eat it, run from it (or mate with it… but we’re forgetting about this).
Our natural reaction when confronted with “newness” is the same to an extent. Fortunately, we have another part of our brain, the neo-cortex (the “innovative brain”) which has the ability to override the primitive instincts of the brainstem. We can treat newness with curiosity. We can defer judgment and look for the possibilities that exist in new ideas. We can be smarter than gators if we choose to be. Innovation teams are smarter than gators most of the time (notice we didn’t say “all of the time”?). Creative leaders on innovation teams have re-habituated themselves so that their first response to newness is to understand it fully before they assess its potential value. It’s their pathway out of the swamp.
Have you seen a gator or at least a gator response in your organization? If you could like to learn more on how to eradicate the gator read, "How the modern innovation leader deals with primitive responses".
How do you
manage to keep in tune with your organization’s strategic goals while also
sustaining a culture of innovation? That’s the topic of our next webinar.
Your next good idea may come from collaborating with the person sitting next to you or sitting half-way around the world. As Steven Johnson writes, "Chance favors the connected mind." Learn more about the power of collaboration...
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Jack Andraka is an amazing 15-year-old scientist and inventor. He developed a simple test to screen for pancreatic, lung and ovarian cancer that is faster, cheaper and more accurate than most tests. Here is his fascinating story.
What a great example of making connections! Here, Jack connected nanotubes and antibodies. But, there are many more examples, suitcases with wheels and magnetic paint come to mind.
We find that making "forced connections" can be a very powerful tool for generating new ideas. The next time you are working with your team to solve a challenge, try to force some connections. Who knows what solutions you will create!
Here's how: