Stimulating your creativity
Faced with the need to innovate, we can organize ourselves to generate ideas in sufficient numbers for some of them to bear fruit. And artificial intelligence tools can help us push back the borders of our creativity.
Innovating has never been more vital—or more difficult. To stand out in the age of hyper-competition, to meet considerable technological, societal, and human challenges, companies have a constant need to imagine disruptive ideas. And yet, it appears that innovation performances are slowing down: Stanford researchers have shown that, for equivalent invested resources, innovation efficiency has been declining for several decades.
At the individual level, this paradox translates into increasingly pressing injunctions: “Be creative!”; “Think outside the box!”. Short of being accompanied by methods, these injunctions are counterproductive. Feeling under pressure to generate brilliant ideas is the most surefire recipe for curbing your creativity.
On the other hand, we can organize ourselves to multiply our ideas, to give ourselves the best chances of coming up with one that will make the difference. This approach is far from being a fallback: innovation results from exploring multiple options, far more than from a stroke of genius. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the number of creative successes is correlated to the number of works created: the more symphonies one composes, the more great symphonies one generates; the more mathematical theorems one elaborates, the more mathematical breakthroughs one makes; etc. This mechanism is confirmed by feedback from within the most innovative companies. The Chief Food Innovation Officer at Taco Bell generates around 50 ideas a month. Out of 300 to 500 ideas that make it to the study phase, only 20 to 30 find their way to market. At a toy manufacturer, 4,000 ideas generated 200 prototypes, a dozen products launched, and two to three authentic successes. Observations often result in a ratio along the lines of 2,000 ideas for one success.
Good news: ways exist to strengthen your ability to generate ideas! Today, we have a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying creativity and of how to stimulate them. What’s more, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) tools can fuel even more abundant ideation phases. What if you pushed back the limits of your creativity?
In this synopsis:
– Using AI tools as creativity helpers
– Cultivating your ability to think “outside the box”
– Assembling the conditions for creative brainstorming
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To foster creativity, rather than going to search for talents and methods outside the company, it might be equally beneficial to rely on internal forces. How can you unleash the creativity of your own teams?
