Key Takeaways
- New innovations are unfamiliar combinations of current building blocks
- Master the rules so you can break them
- Taking ideas from different domains and applying them to your ideas is a great way to have break through insights
- Developing a flexible mind is key – aim to find inspiration from any field
- Prime yourself and then let the subconscious mind mull and dream
- When the world is ready for our idea, it tends to pop up at several places at the same time
- Being well-connected across social circles helps in spreading your creativity and having serendipity aid you in your journey
- Creativity = curiosity + imagination + action
- Gain technical and cultural rules, then add skills
- Productive thinking creates new knowledge structures
- Finding a problem comes down to identifying the right problem to solve and framing it in the right context. When you put problems in a different context, by questioning whether you are solving the right problem, the number and nature of possible solutions change along with the context
- Creativity finds problems by questioning the existing knowledge structure of a conceptual domain
- Creativity is a mental tool that solves problems by divergent thinking (finding as many solutions as possible) and convergent thinking (finding the best solution)
- The largest portion of the creative process consists of exploring a proverbial map that is still partly undiscovered. Because we often don’t know where we are heading, serendipity is important for finding our destination. In fact, the less detailed the map, the more important Darwinian trial and error becomes.
- Creativity is an evolutionary mechanism of trial and error that helps human beings and cultures to constantly adapt to changing environments
- Creativity builds rich knowledge structures and executes complex ideas through interaction between individuals
- We can expand the capacity of our brain by means of a notebok because it allows us to consciously play with ideas outside our brain. With the internet, we can also expand our knowledge and interact with others. Interaction between individuals catalyzes the creative process. Great ideas, however, are always built with a single-minded vision
- I never search, I find. – Pablo Picasso
- The paradox of finding an insight is that only when we stop consciously searching for it do we come across it
- Preparation to Incubation to Inspiration
- Sharing ideas is great but having an active conversation really catalyzes the creative process
- Collaborative Creativity, Distributed Cognition
What I got out of it
- Creativity is a process that consists of internalizing the rules that define a domain (preparation), of letting the acquired knowledge digest while we wait for an insight to appear (incubation), and of assessing and execution the insight (verification). Having a flexible, open, multidisciplinary minds that seeks out connections aids in creativity and reaching insights
