A mystery What is innovation? Is it an improvement, a further development of the product? Is it an extra button? A new colour? Or something impossible? To encourage innovative thinking we need to inspire action and at least in some cases, swim against the tide. The pitfall that many for us step into when trying …
World Thinkers’ Ideas – Creative Machines
Robots are machines that are programmed to perform tasks. Can a robot be creative? And how can you use robots as inspiration for new insights. Driven by a desire to build a scientist smarter than himself, Jürgen Schmidhuber decided to become an artificial intelligence expert. He believes that our dominated place as creativity experts may …
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Learning to Innovate: An Abstract Art
Learning to innovate: an abstract art? Many companies and organisations may not have noticed that innovation means something else than more research, more technology, more money, or taking more risks. All these factors comes after the conception of an idea for innovation. Inventing ideas is thinking. And a truly innovative idea does not exist - it is only …
World Thinkers’ Ideas – Look for Similarities
Many of us would be offended if someone calls us an animal. But why does animals have such a bad reputation? Frans de Waal, primatologist and ethologist, says that part of the problem is the direction of thinking that has been used in research. The focus has been on characteristics that are missing rather than …
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Jumping to Thinking is a Waste of Time
Some of us start thinking about something just out of the blue. Thinking is similar to walking out of the door for a Sunday morning walk, without a plan or a destination. We are happy with what comes along, and sometimes we call it an insight or a conclusion. In my experience, thinking could be …
World Thinkers’ Ideas – Shape Your Brain
A burning desire to overcome learning problems mixed with a conviction that you could shape your brain, lead Barbara Arrowsmith-Young to design exercises to help her heal herself. Great discoveries are always fascinating to read about and you can learn about ways to get new ideas. But great discoveries are rarely made by a person …
Thinking about Value
Thinking about Value The importance of value is the theme in the book “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The narrator observes that grown-ups like numbers. Grown-ups think that they know a person after then have asked questions related to a new friend’s age and how much money his parent’s make. The little prince …
Earth Day and Constructive Thinking
Actions Speak Louder than Words The annual Earth Day is marked by a mix of ideas ranging from inspired initiatives to shameless ideas where the purpose it to get us to buy even more. “Together, we can help to make Every Day Earth Day!” is a great idea but when it is put next to …
World Thinkers’ Ideas – Believe in the Impossible
What do a driverless car, Google, and democracy in higher education have in common? The German computer scientist Sebastian Thrun is a creative mind working in the zone between the possible and impossible. Resisting impossible ideas are easy but inventors are unhappy, says Sebastian Thrun. Inventors are constantly searching for solutions and they feel the pain of …
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World Thinkers’ Ideas- Lawyer for the Animals
What does it feel like to have no voice? Ethical values are important for the Swiss lawyer Antoine Goetschel. He represents abused animals in the court. The clients are mostly dogs but he also represents the interests of other pets, farm animals, and wildlife. Since the 1970s, Swiss animals have been more protected in legislation …
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Thinking and Possibilities
Possibilities can play a vital role in your life. The term possibility is often defined as potential, and the search for possibilities could be the aim of thinking. Possibilities are potentials and gateways for opportunities. If you close down your thinking and stop actively searching for more possibilities then you could miss opportunities and fail …
New Groupthink
Fashion changes quickly. Admittedly, ideas about thinking may not change quite as rapidly, but you can nevertheless detect changes. Today, working together in teams is popular. The lone thinker is out of fashion. More brains mean more ideas. Working together in a group, highlights the social nature of a project. Everyone will feel that …
Create Opportunities
Learn to Spot and Create To create opportunities, you need imagination and skills to abstract or generate ideas from concepts. These skills can be taught and one approach relies on making lists of everything and anything that could be improved in the world. Another approach is to avoid using the word “problem.“ The only …
The Emotional Life of Your Brain – Book Review
Are you feeling gloomy and miserable? Neuropsychologist Richard Davidson and science writer Sharon Begley book “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” may provide you with some insight into your emotions and even give you some inspiration about ways to challenge and change your outlook on life. One hundred years ago, psychologists and biologists were interested …
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Innovation – Selecting Solutions
Why should you avoid selecting the "best" idea? Below is an extract from Jeffrey Baumgartner's Report 103, which he has kindly given us permission to reprint. Jeffrey's website is filled with inspiring articles about how to be creative and make your business more innovative. In the article below, he writes about ways to select a solution and …
Dealing with Negative Points
Any objections? Throw away that option immediately! As you probably have noticed - at home, work or at a party – when a proposal is made, an idea presented or a solution for a problem suggested, it is often met by an objection. That is not bad as such since an idea is seldom perfect. …
Design Thinking
Every designer needs to look somewhere for inspiration and ideas. Design Thinking is Andrew Taylor's speciality. He has kindly written a story about how a designer got inspiration for the next big thing. Andrew has worked with design engineering and industrial design. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts with a keen interest in …
How to Fail Most Successfully
Ultra-Solutions, first coined by Paul Watzlawick, are solutions that in a previous situation worked brilliantly or at least to your satisfaction. Then you try the solution in another context and it turns into the opposite. The solution is worse than the disease. It is a way to fail most successfully. Rocket silos NASA built silos …
World Thinkers’ Ideas – Fitness Club for the Brain
Alvaro Fernandez is SharpBrains’ co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. He was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum (WEF). This forum honours young leaders around the world for discovering innovation solutions to problems that are regarded as significant in today’s world. Alvaro Fernandez was born in Spain but he has lived in …
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Thinking Patterns
People vary greatly in what they notice. Different things capture our attention. We focus our attention on different things depending upon our experiences, knowledge, values and goals. As a result, we will see certain aspects and ignore others. Our capacity to process information is limited. Information organises itself into patterns like magnetic marbles. The handling of …
