Innovationingredients

Creativity can be abundant, have diverse ingredients in it, and it must be unlocked to maximize its potential.

Creativity is a long-term endeavor to generate innate ideas. Creative people usually have a winning mixture composed of character and creative intelligence, think and work independently, identify patterns, connect unusual dots, develop their creativity, and build innovative problem-solving competency.

Cognitive ability & style: Cognition can happen in many different ways and combinations. Cognitive competency refers to growth mindset, clarified logic, and creativity. Technically, the more we know, the more relevant thoughts can be generated; the better cognitive ability we can sharpen to generate fresh ideas or unique insight. At the higher level of cognitive maturity, people can master different thought processes skillfully, and improve cognitive competency and unlock their creative potential.

Interdisciplinary knowledge & skills: The world becomes much more hyper-connected and interdependent than ever, interdisciplinary thinking helps to understand the interdependence of issues, recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in the circumstances and integrate multidisciplinary knowledge and methodology. Interdisciplinary skills and knowledge are in strong demand to spur creative ideas by connecting cross domain dots to pollinate ideas, and catalyze knowledge transfer innovation. Creative people combine existing possibilities to reach more often unexpected solutions.

Learning agility: People with strong cognitive abilities keep expanding their cognitive threshold via learning and deepening understanding. Continuing learning and updating knowledge allows new pieces of information to be synthesized for generating new ideas and fresh insight. In fact, the most important capability of the cognitive mind is the willingness and ability to seek out relevant knowledge, filter a set of information we are interested in, gain an in-depth understanding of surroundings, connecting dots to generate great ideas or solve problems innovatively. To become more innovative, you need to not only assimilate existing knowledge but also have to keep updating knowledge, create new knowledge, and become knowledge expert combining with incredible imagination to spur great ideas all the way.

Intellectual engagement: Collaborating and sharing are what spurs innovation. In practice, it's important to create the space in which people feel more comfortable to participate in debating, idea sharing, exploring what to do with that knowledge and connecting disparate ideas that don't seem to fit together naturally to drive innovation. In practice, creative teams should have a cognitive difference and diversified worldview, collaborate, clarify, and build on each other's ideas. With emerging collaboration platforms and tools, cross-functional collaboration and intellectual engagement are the new normal in the effective digital workplace. The management allows room and time for play and experimentation, cultivate zest and shape a people-centric innovative organization.

Emotional intelligence: Innovativeness is a state of mind which requires multifaceted thought processes and nonlinear logical reasoning. Intuition, idea generation can be in mind which is free of turbulence and has the knack of achieving balance. Emotional excellence helps to develop an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, show capacity to adapt, take calculated risk to drive innovation. People with emotional intelligence present a positive mindset, be an effective listener, show openness to experience, tolerance of ambiguity, have the right dose of risk appetite to innovate, have a passion/drive for achievement consistently.

Creativity can be abundant, have diverse ingredients in it, and it must be unlocked to maximize its potential. Creativity is like a color spectrum; there are commonalities that are relevant to all colors which reflect the spectrum of light. Such a metaphor connects the dot back to the nature of creativity. Creative competency becomes the power force to make a seamless paradigm shift from knowledge economy to creativity economy.

Posted in: Creativity,Innovation