How
To Increase Your Creativity and Innovation
- 10
Creativity Observations
By
John Alexander
In this article, I want to share with you how you can
increase your innovation, enhance your creativity and tap into brand new ideas where
you are the originator.
Certainly this will be easier for some folks than it is for others
based on your thinking style. For some us, we already tend to be highly
creative and then others of us, will tend to be more analytical.
Analytical minds tend to be useful at analytics, measuring and
interpreting progress. While the highly creative thinkers are often
called dreamers or sometimes can become nearly visionary. |
|
The first thing to realize is that
whether you are more analytical or
more creative, that bit thinking styles are important. It is possible
for a team of creative people to come up with literally dozens or even
hundreds of new ideas (which will often separate someone from their
competition.) However, the best results will never be achieved only by
coming up with brand new innovations, unless there are the analytical
logical thinkers who can take the ideas and find ways to make them a
reality.
That's the way Walt Disney viewed it back in the early days. His
creative right brained thinkers were all brought together in a room and
encourage to just go wild with their ideas. Eventually, he called them
"imagineers" and rightly so.
Disney believed that there was a valid place for both creative and the
analytical thinkers and the only difference was that the Imagineers
were in one room being creative, coming up with cartoon movie plots, ideas
for adventure stories, or adapting established stories over for the
screen for maximum entertainment value while the more left brained,
analytical, logical types were also engineers but of a different type.
They were the builders who's job it was to make the Imagineer's visions
into a reality by creating and building a production and bringing it to
reality.
The same is true today at companies that try to get a mix of creative
help along with a mix of balanced, logical thinkers. But for the sake of
this article, I want to focus on the area of creativity and offer you a
few tips that can help you become more creative.
10 Creativity Observations:
1. Most experts agree that it is far easier to be creative when you are
doing something that is fun to do. Some of our best ideas for Search
Engine Workshops were stimulated for example by going for a walk in one
of the parks at Disney world. Even though you are having fun, you can
still think about new ideas and the ideas will come easier to you while
you are relaxed. Children often come up with new ideas when they are
playing a game. Adults are no different. If you are stressing to come
up with some new creative idea, stop stressing or stop putting yourself
under pressure. Instead, go out and do something you enjoy.
2. Some of the most creative business minds understand the importance
of playing and some companies will equip their employee's work place
with things like a gym, a pool table or perhaps a ping pong table, so
employees can take a break and relax once in a while.
3. You may not feel like you are much of an artist, but try giving
yourself the opportunity to sketch your ideas on paper or even just
doodling can bring about some creative aspects to life sometimes.
4. I know of one company that has employees feel free to bring their
pet to work maybe one day a week. As strange as it sounds, this also
can put people in a more relaxed state.
5. It's hard for some people to realize why the shell of the first
computer server ever made at Google by founders, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin was actually built from toy Lego
blocks.
6. The original legendary animators at Disney, were encouraged to
create whatever characters they were bringing to life, by studying the
actual animal's behabior. For example for Bambi, the artists had the
opportunity to study a real dear's movements. For some characters they
used their creativity to soften certain features to make them look
Disney cute. The first drawings of Jiminy Cricket were a little too
realistic and creepy, animator in Ward Kimbal worked on Jiminy until he
was the character we all recognize today.
7. Sometimes, you want to be the originator of something new, but it can
seem so hard to know where to get started. If you have an image of what
the finished creation might be, sometimes it's possible to start by
visualizing the finished result and then work backwards in incremental
steps. This works for story writing and can help with formulating interesting plot twists.
8. Creativity is extremely helpul when mixed with other types of technical skills such as
programming or even doing effective keyword research for search engine optimization. Some of the most powerful keyword observations I've made are not in just taking the logical approach or going after the most obvious keywords that first pop into your mind. Read:
"The benefits of taking an Illogical approach to Keyword Research
9. When you do have new ideas or come up with something that no one else is doing, be sure to take the all important step of testing your ideas. There are some people that continually come up with innovative ideas, but that's where they stop. Test all your ideas to see how they work out.
10. Try not to fall into the trap of continually trying to examine and copy the competition. So many times you will experience much greater benefit, by developing something new. You become the trail blazer and establish new foothold through your own creativity and innovations. The obvious benefit here, is that it puts you ahead of the competition because you created it first.
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About John Alexander:
John Alexander is Director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his
group of Associated SEO Workshop Trainers located
in
communities across North America, Australia
and and
Internationally in Asia and Australia. John
has
taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world
wide and has written articles for EvanCarmichael.com,
The SEO
Mentoring Blog and John recently presented a solo session
for the Toronto
Search Engine Strategy Conference. John also assists a
variety of businesses with organic search engine optimization
services and can be reached at 905-716-4472.
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