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Innovation - How to think innovatively? | 04-Feb-2011

Innovation - How to think innovatively?

Individuals who can think innovatively are inspirational and influential players who add value to their
organization. In this article my aim is to explore how to think innovatively, rather than explore how
organizations innovate to create growth opportunities and improve organizational competence.

Innovation is a means to an end, not an end in itself. In an organizational context the end is to create
profitable growth opportunities and improve organization's competence, innovation opens way to achieve that
goal. Innovation refers to radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, process, products, and organizations.
To think innovatively is to think differently, find fresh ideas, and think out-of-the-box. The goal of
innovation is make positive change, create something new, tackle complex problems, improve or make things
better, and make something completely different. Innovation is risky as it may not always lead to success, one
need to understand the risk involved as there is chance of failure.

Innovative thinking leads to doing something useful – useful discoveries & useful applications;
improvement – improve the way product & services being offered, developing creative solutions,
change the way business being done, which enables an organization to seize an opportunity and create or add
value in a new way.

Kinds of innovation:

Invention: It is an act of pioneering, a science-fiction style out of the box thinking, spectacular science
and engineering marvel that creates something useful. It is imaginative, inspiring, new, and useful , possibly
never has thought or done before.

Up-gradation: Take up an idea, product, or process that already exists and work on it to improve, make it
better, and identify ways of doing things differently, take a failed idea and turn to success, in order to create
or add value in a new way.

Adaptation: Make use of an idea that is used or applied in one context and apply or use tin a context that
is contrast or indirectly connected to the original context. It also requires finding required changes and
making sure that it fits or suits well in another context to resolve complex or unresolvable problems.

Implementation: Finding creative solutions to obstacles that hinders/stops the implementation. It is about
finding a creative solution to the problem encountered in a way that enables the implementation to continue
unstopped.

How to think innovatively?

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Be Calm: relax and keep your mind fresh and less pressured, some of the best ideas spark in mind when
one is relaxed and less stressed. Fine your own way of calming and relaxing yourself, like taking a walk etc.

Curiosity: keep your mind in the state of curiosity, inquisitive, observe, and understand. Remove
self-inhibitions – self created mind constraints, assumptions that restrict your exploration.

Imaginative: unlock the creative part of you, do not prejudge and squash thoughts prematurely, allow
your imagination and creative intuition to take charge. Think what can be done differently.

Be Deliberate: deliberately think differently, refuse to think in a natural habitual way or regular way, that
is not confine to the existing paradigm of conventional boundaries of thinking within which you operate.

Challenge and Question: challenge assumptions and question accepted facts in way that breaks the
conventional wisdom that pushes to explore new alternatives and find new ways of doing things.

Change the view point: – find new perspective, angle, and alternative positions to think from in
order to perceive differently that can result in thinking and perceiving things differently than the normal way
things are perceived.

Stretch the limit: break the existing norms or accepted norms. Deal with fear of failure, take risks, and
experiment with ideas to discover what can work and what cannot work.

Exposure: expose yourself to wide variety of things. Ideas come from other ideas. Experience and expose
to new things and perspectives, variety of alternative ideas, find inspiration in crazy things. Informed about
the existing and emerging trends and technologies.

Feedback: ask people their opinions and ideas to collect inputs and organize and arrange their ideas to
arrive at better one.

Tools for innovative Thinking:

(I will post a blog on each of these topics in coming days to give the readers an elaborate view on each of the
following topics)

Brainstorming: an activity that can be done individually or in group, more effective when done in group,
to generate large number of ideas in shortest time. To know more read my other blog – Brainstorming
Techniques for problem solving and team building )

Metaphorical Thinking: connecting two unrelated or indirectly linked things to create ideas that can be

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used effectively to solve problems.

Affinity Diagram: Organize ideas and data coming from sources to store or classify into groups for review
and analysis.

Nominal Group Techniques: collecting opinions and identify commonness, plurality of ideas and
approaches, often leads to creation of hybrid ideas.

Story-boarding: Pre-visualizing tool used in planning ad campaigns, commercials, projects intended to

convene or compel to action.

Mind mapping: using diagram to work around a central idea to organize information other items linked
and arranged around the central idea.

6 hat thinking: tool to look at thing from number of different perspectives, pushing one to think outside the
habitual way of thinking.

(Sudhakar Prabu)

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