Awakening Your Innovative Thinking

Innovative thinking for many is a God given gift. For most people, though, innovative thinking is something they have to learn. For the majority of people, learning how to be an innovative thinker can be a struggle. To make the process easier here's a few pointers that can help you to recognize skills that can be helpful in innovative thinking.

This list of skills you should work with to help you develop innovative thinking:

Being able to look at something in a different way. If you can look at the sluggish real estate market and find creative ways to close deals, for example, seeing beyond plunging property values and looking at the golden opportunities of a down market readjusting itself , then you are on your way to innovative thinking. Take that idea and run with it. While you may never come up with a great invention from it, you can use this brainstorming exercise to help develop your innovative thinking skills and turn a negative into a positive.

Being able to look at what others have done and see a need for improvement. If you can recognize things that are not quite perfect or that have the potential to be better, then you can be an innovative thinker.

Being able to weed through piles of information to get to the good stuff. If you can easily take a bunch of nonsense and make some sense out of it, then you can be an innovative thinker. You should recognize that innovative thinking involves a lot of nonsense and being able to get to the heart of things is a true innovative skill.

Being committed. Innovation requires a lot of commitment. If you are the type of person who can commit to something and who does not give up, then you are a prime candidate to be an innovative thinker.

You probably already have many skills of an innovative thinker. All you need to do is recognize that you have it in you. You can be an innovative thinker and use that ability to come up with many inventions and ideas.

How Innovative Thinking can Work in your particular situation

Deriving new inventions and ideas form innovative thinking is a process. While thinking, in general, is usually not very well structured, there is a general structure that can help when working with innovative thinking. You have to have some path to follow so you can take something from an idea to an invention.

Innovative thinking starts with defining the situation. You have to look at what you are working with and define what is needed or what your desired outcome is to be. You basically have to know where you are going. Define what you want the final outcome to be.
 
Example: what advantages and opportunities do I  have in this downward economy?
Now you can gather information. Innovative thinking is not about just being able to come up with things out of thin air. You need to have background information. Find out what others may have already tried. By gathering information, you are able to avoid repeating others mistakes or you may possibly find an idea that you can work with to improve upon.

Next comes the actual innovative process. You are going to be brainstorming. You will be creative and inventive. Anything goes in this step of the process. There is really no room for logic. Sometimes innovation is born from an idea that seems unrealistic. A good example is cell phones. At one point people would have thought it was crazy to be able to walk around and talk on the phone no matter where you are. Today cell phones are a the way of life that is hard to live without.

After coming up with ideas you can then begin to go through them. Weed out those that are not going to work for one reason or another. Make a list of the most promising ideas. You are going to move on to work with these and develop them more.  Now you evaluate your list. You will try to develop these raw ideas further. At this point, you will likely see some emerge as being the most likely to work. You will also be able to get rid of a few more ideas.

You should now be able to define your final solution. You can begin to work on implementing the idea and making it a reality. The process of innovative thinking is actually rather structured. You have some points where you can be unstructured and let your creativity take over, but overall you have to maintain some sense of structure so that your great ideas do not get lost or overlooked.

Your comments are always welcome if this has helped you in any way please post your comments!

By John M. BetanCourt

www.realtimecustomers.com  Avoiding the Pitfalls of Starting a Business

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