To Improve Your Creative Output and Innovation at Work, Improve Your Ideas

To Improve Your Creative Output and Innovation At Work, Improve Your Ideas

Once you select an idea after idea generation, you can add to your creative output and innovation by improving the idea as much as you can. The idea-improving triggers described below help you accomplish this creatively and may stimulate additional new ideas or provide new perspectives.

Like-Improve Analysis

1.Write down the idea.

2.Non-evaluatively list the characteristics and properties of the idea.

3.Non-evaluatively list what you like and what you find useful about the idea.

4.Non-Evaluatively list deficiencies that need improving in the idea. List these as problem statements.

5.Non-evaluatively list ways to overcome these deficiencies and improve the idea by responding to the problem statements.

6.Recycle all the above until the idea shines.

This procedure works very well even with the most bizarre ideas.

Improve Your Idea Creatively

Juggle your new idea in your mind until the isea clicks into place. Do it this way.

•Make it larger, greater, or extend and magnify it.

•Make it smaller, delete it, contract or diminish it.

•Rearrange it, transpose it, or substitute for it.

•Consider it from a different point of view.

•Reverse it.

•Distort it.

•Make it stronger, taller, shorter, thicker, lighter, or weaker.

•Draw it.

•Sing it.

•Write a poem about it.

•Split it.

•Massage it.

•Combine and blend many ideas.

•Sort them.

•Shuffle them.

•Turn it upside down, backwards, opposite.

•Slice them into bits.

•Dance it.

•Make a metaphor of it.

•Imagine how it would work out and change it.

•Imagine what your favorite relative would say and modify it.

•Paint it.

•Eat it.

•Sleep on it.

•Lie on it.

•Roll it up.

•Stomp on it.

•Change its shape.

•Add to it.

Force combinations between your idea and other objects into additional new ideas. Combine remote associations and watch your creative thinking take off. Combine old ideas into new creative combinations. •

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Edward Glassman, PhD was the President of the Creativity College®, a division of Leadership Consulting Services, Inc., and Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he founded and headed the Program For Team Effectiveness And Creativity.