65 Posts Found

An epiphany is the tip of the creative iceberg, and all epiphanies are grounded in work. If you take any magic moment of discovery from history and wander backwards in time you’ll find dozens of smaller observations, inquiries, mistakes, and comedies that occurred to make the epiphany possible. All the great inventors knew this-and typically they downplayed the magic moments. But we all love exciting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: How to Change the World | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

The creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Numerous people have studied the process that creative people go through to develop their ideas. Most of these students of creativity agree that ideas come from a subconscious process that takes two relatively unassociated thoughts and combines them together to produce a new thought-a new idea.

Content: Quotation | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Because of patent law, which exists to protect intellectual capital, we often think the value of an idea lies in its creation. Yet the value of an idea lies in the audience, not its source, and one idea can be ‘created’ many, many times. Creativity exists in a chain: an idea comes from this group and goes to that group, and that group then carries … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Creativity, Intellectual Property

There are two qualities that usually determine a creative person’s potential…curiosity and determination. The curious learn, grow, and develop potential. The determined have the resolve to overcome the obstacles they encounter on their way to fulfilling their potential.

Content: Quotation | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Creativity, Success / Failure

People often take the view that standardization is the enemy of creativity. But I think that standards help make creativity possible — by allowing for the establishment of an infrastructure, which then leads to enormous entrepreneurialism, creativity, and competitiveness.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

The great enemy of creativity is fear. When we’re fearful, we freeze up. Creativity has a lot to do with a willingness to take risks.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subject: Creativity

Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity over the somnambulistic vices of corporate conformity may actually be giving advice that in the end will reduce the creative animation of business. This is because they tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation-that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive’s day-to-day problems; and underestimate the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Organizational Behavior

Advocacy of a “permissive environment” for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact: One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Organizational Behavior

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.

Content: Quotation | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Creativity, Thought

Great creativity requires hard facts, wild imagination, and nonlogical jumps forward that are then proved to be right by working backward to known principles. Only the rebellious can do it.

Content: Quotation | Source: The Atlantic Monthly | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure – and the only kind that deserves to be punished. Researcher Dean Keith Simonton provides strong evidence from multiple studies that creativity results from action. Renowned geniuses like Picasso, da Vinci, and physicist Richard Feynman didn’t succeed at a higher rate than their peers. They simply produced more, which meant that they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Imagination is a vantage point of the future from which we can consider that which is lacking in the present.

Content: Quotation | Source: Unknown | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Nothing in the business world is more overrated than a “good idea.” Nothing. I’ve never gone into an organization anywhere in the world that didn’t have-with a little prompting and encouragement-more good ideas than it could possibly use. Indeed, most firms enjoy a surplus-a glut-of good ideas. As a rule, a glut of something makes it less valuable, not more. Economics 101.

By contrast, I’ve never … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Change is not about understanding new things or having new ideas; it’s about seeing old things with new eyes — from different perspectives. Change is not about reorganizing, reengineering, reinventing, recapitalizing. It’s about reconceiving! When you reconceive something — a thought, a situation, a corporation, a product — you create a whole new order. Do that, and creativity will flood your mind.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Change Management, Creativity

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Content: Quotation | Source: Johannesburg Business Day | Subject: Creativity

Bear in mind that creativity is not coming up with an idea out of nowhere; it’s an act of synthesis, of bringing together several things into a novel combination. Creativity is something in service to innovation; it’s not innovation itself. And again, it’s hard work.

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

If every valuable creative idea is logical in hindsight, then it is only natural to suppose, and to claim, that such ideas could have been reached by logic in the first place and that creativity is unnecessary. That is the main reason why, culturally, we have never paid serious attention to creativity.

Content: Quotation | Source: ManagerWise | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

What is the biggest obstacle to creativity? Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you’re doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Content: Quotation | Source: Unknown | Subject: Creativity