Imagine you are sitting in a meeting with a group of your colleagues, trying to solve a business challenge. As usual, someone is up at the whiteboard or flipchart writing down dot point after dot point. You leave the meeting feeling great – you have 20 or so dot points that you can use toRead more
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Is your idea being rejected? You might be on to something… In 1975, two years after graduating from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Steven J. Sasson invented the world’s first digital camera. It was 3.4 kg and images took 23 seconds to be captured in black and white on a cassette. When he presented his ideaRead more
There are many creativity tools that we research at Inventium that, although sound great on the surface, actually have inconsistent scientific evidence behind them. One such tool, which involves showing people surprising images such as: an Eskimo on a beach, or a hipster on the moon, or a footballer on an ice-hockey rink, has beenRead more
In his first year of University Steve Jobs dropped out. Instead he decided to just ‘drop-in’ to calligraphy classes. Jobs learnt all about typefaces and beautiful lettering despite the fact he had no application for it. Several years later, Jobs was toiling away trying to come up with the next big thing in computers. AfterRead more
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting with some ‘bad moods’ in the room? Or perhaps you have been that person who has felt a bit flat? In a recent ideation workshop I noticed one person who appeared a little down and withdrawn. They struggled to contribute ideas and also impacted the group dynamic.Read more
Can you remember the last time you got a group of people together to come up with creative solutions to a problem? Think about who was in the room with you. Were there any unexpected characters, or were the usual suspects wheeled in? Something we see in teams all over the world is people unintentionallyRead more
The common expectation and hope of brainstorming and problem solving meetings is that those involved will immediately be able to generate creative ideas and solutions. However, time and time again I have seen these meetings start off with people just putting the same old ideas forward. The problem is that many people go straight intoRead more
Creativity lies at the heart of innovation. One of the most popular ways to generate creative ideas is through brainstorming. Typically a lot of the emphasis in brainstorming sessions lies within the idea generation phase. The more ideas we come up with the better right? Not really. Generating a lot of creative ideas is fantastic,Read more
A successful outcome of an idea generation session is to have a whole stack of break-through ideas to a particular business challenge or opportunity. However, there is a common blocker we see when people get together to come up with innovative solutions. Sometimes, people have the tendency to put on their critical thinking caps prematurelyRead more
Where we sit in relation to others has a huge impact on who we chose to collaborate with. Yes, this makes intuitive sense – but some awesome researchers at the University of Michigan were recently able to quantify the size of this impact. Associate Professor Jason Owen-Smith observed a bunch of other researchers from theRead more