wanless

Intelligent Innovation

As orga­ni­za­tions rec­og­nize the need to be more inno­v­a­tive in the cre­ative econ­omy of the 21st cen­tury, an ide­o­log­i­cal debate over method­ol­ogy con­tin­ues to rage. Most cre­ativ­ity and inno­va­tion train­ing falls into two camps – the sys­tem­atic  “thinker” approach, and the right-brain-first approach of the “intuitives”. Despite the grow­ing...

wanless

Cartooning For Creative Problem Solving

Since I’m always look­ing for use­ful cre­ativ­ity meth­ods, I had an Aha! moment dur­ing a recent visit to a video game studio. For those of you who aren’t in the film or video game busi­ness, sto­ry­boards are really single-panel car­toons, much like the comics, that out­line the “story” a film maker or video game designer wants to tell. Usu­ally, it’s a visual ref­er­ence that...

wanless

Brainstorm or Braindrain?

A post by Mark McGuin­ness, of Lat­eral Action, lay­ing out the case for and against Brain­storm­ing made me real­ize why I cringe when­ever I hear the term. The name for the tech­nique advanced by Alex Osborn in his 1963 book Applied Imag­i­na­tion is used — or make that mis­used– too often today. Can you think of any kind of prob­lem solv­ing situ­aion in recent years where peo­ple...