Fundamentals of Creativity

& Innovation
Session 2

Helmi Issa
 To strive & thrive you need creative ideas

• …..downsizing tends to make us timid when we need to be bold

• …...the creative employees are the ones that will survive

 Process that makes you creative

• The work environment

• Traits

• The 4-step creative process

• Brainstorming

• Divergent thinking

+ Flow (full immersion/involvement in creativity)

The work environment

• The size of the team is critical

• Think about where you come up with more creative ideas
• A passion for what they are doing, a genuine respect for others’ ideas

Traits

• Simply believing you’re creative

• Curiosity
• Confidence
• Courage
• Constancy
• To understand the creative process itself
The 4-step creative process

• Preparation
• Data gathering
• About a specific subject/topic
• Divergent (to gather data without any influence like time, money, people…)

• Incubation
• Steps to achieve “Alpha state”
• Close your eyes
• Slow, deep breaths
• Focus on a single image

• Inspiration
• Be prepared to act
• Don’t waste a good idea

• Verification
• Determining & testing
• Validity of idea
• Usefulness of idea
Brainstorming

• Process of generating ideas and solutions through intensive & freewheeling group
discussion

• Every participant is encourages to think aloud and suggest as many ideas as possible, no
matter how strange it is

Thinking outside the box

Techniques of brainstorming

• Time travel
• Suppose you are facing a particular problem at this particular time. How would you have dealt with that
problem a decade ago? A year ago? A month ago? This technique helps to gather new ideas according to time

• Teleportation
• What if you were facing this problem in a different place? Different country? Different universe? Different
existence? How would you handle it?

• Attribute change
• How would you think about this if you were a different gender? Age? Race? Intellect? Height? Weight?
Nationality?

• Role storming
• What would you do if you were someone else? Your parent? Your teacher? Your manager? Your friend? Your
enemy?

• Gap filling
• What is the gap that exists between A (you) & B (end goal)? What would you do to fill up the gap?

• Write a list of many ideas

• No restrictions, add as many ideas as possible
• SWOT analysis
• Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, & Threats

• Brain writing
• Get a group of people and have each one write down his/her ideas on a sheet of paper. Rotate the sheets with
different people and build up on what others wrote in the paper

• Trigger method
• Brainstorm as many ideas as possible. Then select the best ones and brainstorm on those ideas as “triggers” for
more ideas. Repeat until you find the best solution

• Reverse thinking
• Think about what everyone will typically do in your situation. Then do the opposite

• Resource availability
• What if money, time, people, supplies are not issues at all? What if you can ask for whatever you want and have
it happen? What will you do?

• Exaggeration
• Exaggerate your goals and see how you will deal with it now. Enlarge it: What if it is 10 times its current size?
100 times? 1000 times? Shrink it: What if it is 1/10 its current size?

• Meditation
• Focus on your key questions (How can I solve this specific problem?; How can I achieve that specific goal?)
Divergent thinking

• It includes the ability to elaborate, and think of diverse and original ideas with fluency and speed. Its goal
is to generate many different ideas about a topic in a short period of time

Strategies of divergent thinking

• Self analysis: Ask questions to yourself

• Topic analysis: Analyze the topic you have

 Factors influencing creativity
(groups or organizational level)
• Motivation
• Organizational motivation to innovate is the basic orientation towards innovation and
supports for creativity and innovation

• Resources
• Everything that an organization has to aid work in the domain targeted for innovation.
Adequacy of allocation

• Management practices
• Refers to allowance of freedom in conduct of work, provision of challenging and
interesting work, specification of clear strategic goals, formation of work teams with
diverse skills and perspectives, focus on technology and reward and incentive structures

• Group characteristics
• Norms, group cohesiveness, size, diversity, roles, tasks characteristics, and problem
solving approaches
• Organizational encouragement
• Encouragement of risk taking and idea generation at all levels. Fair supportive evaluation of new
ideas, reward & recognition of creativity, collaborative idea flow and participatory decision
making

• Supervisory encouragement
• Clarity of goal and problem identification, open interactions, support for team work and ideas

• Work group encouragement

• Diversity of team members background, mutual openness to ideas, constructive challenging of
ideas, shared commitment

• Autonomy
• Autonomy in day to day conduct of work, sense of ownership and control over work and ideas

• Pressures
• Excessive workload pressure, challenge due to intrinsic nature. Pressures could be of two types:
Positive (constructive criticism) or Inhibitive (lack of consideration)

• Organizational impediments
• Internal strife, conservatism, rigid and formal management structures
 Factors influencing creativity
(individual level)
• Age
• Creativity decreases with age, unless the individual is intentionally creative

• Intelligence
• Certain level required for certain measures of creativity

• Personality
• High valuation of aesthetic qualities in experiences, interests, attraction to complexities,
independence of judgments, self confidence, ability to resolve conflicting traits in self

• Disposition
• High level of intrinsic motivation, follow intrinsic interests, free from constraints

• Capabilities
• Insight is the a result of integration of previously learned behaviors

• Potential
 Factors influencing creativity
(demographics)

• Birth order
• Youngest, middle, or oldest child

• Family size

• Number of siblings

• Family & school atmosphere

 General types of creativity
Attention is related to retrieval of
affective memory: Insights depend
upon specific emotion and conform to
Deliberate individual values and norms. It is
independent of domain knowledge
Occur when neural activity of emotional
structures is spontaneously represented in
working memory after an intense
Spontaneous emotional activity experience. Are not
domain specific. Require specific skills.
Called revelation
Emotional
Attention is related to search for task-
related information. Quality of insights
depends upon expertise and how
flexible cognitively the prefrontal
cortex is – domain independent trait.
Creativity is domain specific
Insight has origin in associative
unconscious thinking when thresholds are
lowered (Incubation). Do not conform to
convention. Because conscious when
represented in working memory: Depend
upon expertise
Cognitive
Furthermore, other than the types, there are ways to enhance your
creativity

“Rule breaking creativity”

 “Be-foolish”

Think against the conventional flow, like the fool in Shakespearean times
“Think outside your area”
And NOW….as Groups, start with your brainstorming related to your chosen topics