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How to Increase Your Creativity and Innovation - 10 Creativity Observations

Guest post by: John Alexander

Article Overview: 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.

How to Increase Your Creativity and Innovation - 10 Creativity Observations

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 behavior. 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 Jimminy Cricket were a little too

realistic and creepy, animator in Ward Kimbal worked on Jimminy 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.

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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Article Tags: creative thinking, creativity, innovasion



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