Every time you produce something creative, there is a high chance that it might fail. It doesn’t matter if it is an innovative new product idea, a new song, or a new recipe. Whatever you produce, and no matter how successful you have previously been, it does not mean that customers will want what you have produced. For example, in recent years Hollywood films have more frequently begun to “bomb” at the box office, taking in less ticket sales than was expected. Often this means that a film will not even make enough money to cover the cost of producing it. While this risk of bombing has always e ..read more

Imagine this. You work for a board game manufacturer, and you have been asked to improve the sales of your chess games. They have been slowly falling over the past few years and your boss has asked you to come up with innovative solutions to make it more appealing and increase sales. How would you approach this innovation challenge? A lot of people might begin thinking that innovation means finding ways to “improve” the product. People naturally want to innovate by adding value, and this usually means a bias towards adding more. In this case, what sorts of innovations could we introduce to upd ..read more

Recently my toddler has begun playing with Duplo, which is Lego for really young children. And while usually he loves it, it also often causes him to become incredibly frustrated when things do not work as he wants. This is when he might begin shouting and throwing the pieces away. A perfect example is when he has built a tower with a wide top, and wants to attach a long flat piece to the bottom side of the top. This would require some good hand-eye coordination for a adult, but since he has not learned this yet, he tries to push the top piece downwards, causing the whole top to break apart. T ..read more

When your audience thinks of you and what your work represents, who do they think of? It does not matter if your audience is your team at work, the people who buy your art, or the people who follow your presence online. In almost every case, these people will not be thinking of you exactly as you are in real life, with all of your internal dialogues and challenges which only you can hear. They will not be thinking of you the same way you see yourself. Instead, they will be thinking of you as the character who produces the work they see. This insight became clear to me as I recently listened ..read more

Often, when trying to make progress towards an innovative challenge there are thousands of things you could be doing. Examined individually, each of these actions look like they could bring you closer to your end goal. Or worse, they may each be different goals which all seem equally appealing and worth putting effort into. However, if they are each taking up your time and effort, the result is often time working ineffectively, working towards targets which are not aligned and where you end the day not sure whether you actually made any meaningful progress at all. As an example, let us imagin ..read more

If you cannot be the best in the world at something, is it even worth trying? Yes. Often, people can be afraid to begin a new creative endeavor, especially when they compare themselves to people who are the best in the world. After all, how can you compete with someone who is so much better than you are? What they fail to recognise is that these “best in the world” people have often been working on their skills, craft and experience for decades to get to where they are now. Of course they will be better than you are now. But that does not mean you cannot improve. The challenge to overcome is t ..read more

A few weeks ago, I saw an article in Fast Company about the layoffs at IDEO, one of the world’s most respected Design Thinking firms. In fact, IDEO was one of the pioneers of Design Thinking back in the late 1970s, but the process of using Design Thinking as part of innovation work really exploded in the 1990s and 2000s. The rise of Design Thinking and IDEO Back then, Design Thinking was seen as a way to incorporate more human insights into the innovation process, which often struggled when R&D teams or product designers would create new products and not know if there was really a problem ..read more

Sometimes, an innovation comes around that is so simple, it makes you think “why didn’t I think of that?” I just came across another such example from renowned innovation powerhouse 3M. They have found a way to use a principle of origami to create sheets of cardboard which fold themselves into packing material when stretched. Check out this video to find out how it works. Based on the Japanese art of Kirigami, which is cutting and folding paper in interesting ways, 3M innovator Tom Corrigan has been looking for ways to turn flat sheets of card into 3-dimensional objects by stretching them. Th ..read more

Are you the sort of person who procrastinates? Who always seems to put off starting work on something and is easily distracted? While this procrastination may be a significant problem for being productive, and the resulting time pressure can be bad for creativity, there may be some instances when it can be beneficial. According to new research from Shin and Grant (2021), a moderate degree of procrastination may actually be beneficial for your creativity. The researchers wanted to see if there was a link between people delaying themselves starting work on a project, and that time being used to ..read more

Does something need to be completely original in order to be creative? How can you prove if something is original or not? After all, if something which I produce is not original, is it not just a waste of time putting in time and effort creating it? This is a challenge which can petrify many people, and prevent them from trying to produce anything creative. As a result, many potential creative people never even get started. While it is true that in order for something to be creative, it must be at least partially novel, unique or original, what this means is often blown out of proportion. It r ..read more