If you were at risk of losing your only source of income you’d probably stretch your creativity to the limit to find ways of preventing this from happening.
There’s one ‘profession’ that is constantly under threat - crime. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we can find many creative ideas in this field. It’s also not surprising that professional criminals are usually more creative than law authorities - they have a lot fewer resources at their disposal and they therefore need to look for solutions within their closed world.
Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention!
Continue reading ‘CSI – crime as a source of innovation’
Posted in Creativity categories |
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In this post I’d like to discuss an intersting “Mental Block” we all suffer from.
Let’s begin with a simple puzzle:
One of the king’s servants presents him with a bottle and says, “I have in this bottle a magic substance that can dissolve any other substance”. How did the king know immediately that his servant was lying?
The answer is very simple:
If it can dissolve anything, how come it doesn’t dissolve the bottle?!
This is a simple puzzle, and yet many of us need to think a while before we come up with the answer. Why is that?
Continue reading ‘Spot your blind spot’
Posted in Fixednesses categories |
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“Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am” is a famous philosophical quote from René Descartes. 
I have my own version of this statement:
“I think, therefore I am fixated”.
What I mean is that it’s almost impossible for the human brain to produce a really fresh and unique thought. Every thought, opinion or idea is somehow connected to previous concepts stored in the brain.
There are many definitions for fixedness, but I like this one: “The inability to see the solution to a problem although it stares us in the face.”
When we decide or when we are asked to think uniquely or creatively, the fixation intensifies. (So if you want to kill someone’s creativity, just ask him/her to think creatively. I can guarantee you that it works every time!)
So how can we fight fixedness?
Continue reading ‘I think, therefore I am fixated’
Posted in Fixednesses categories |
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Today I was looking for a parking lot and was very happy to find one that displayed a large sign offering one hour free parking with every carwash.
My car certainly needed washing, so I took up the offer and parked my car there. Three hours later I came to get the car and was prepared to pay for two hours parking. To my surprise, the cashier at the booth told me to pay for one hour only.
I couldn’t hide my surprise, and so the cashier explained why.
Continue reading ‘Viral surprise’
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Let’s begin with a small exercise.
©iStockphoto.com/deliormanli
Please invent a new product.
Yes, really, go ahead and invent a new product…
.
.
Stuck ha….?
.
.
I’ll tell you why.
Paradoxically, when a problem statement is too broad, our mind finds it quite difficult to recruit all its creative powers.
Scientific studies have proved time and again that we tend to become more creative in a constrained thinking environment.
I’ll let you see it for yourself.
Continue reading ‘Please invent a new product’
Posted in Ideation categories |
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Irving Biederman, USC psychology and computer science professor, tries to explain why we find one thing more “interesting” than another.
©iStockphoto.com/tomml
According to his theory, we tend to be interested in things that are new to us but at the same time still connected to what we already know. New, but not too new…
Biederman proposes a simple mechanism by which the brain seeks to “maximize the rate at which it acquires new but interpretable information.”
Continue reading ‘Why we call something interesting?’
Posted in Ideation categories |
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I believe that criminals often find creative ideas not because they are really creative people (research shows that they are less creative than average…), but simply because they have no choice.
©iStockphoto.com/stanislav-popov
And not having choice is the mother of creativity.
So here’s a story I once heard on the radio. It’s about an interesting car theft method:
A gang innocently rented a car, but then forged the documents making them identical to those of an existing car of the same make, and replaced its license plate with that of another car (that’s the dirty part. Well…if you want to steal cars, you probably have to get your hands dirty too!)
They then sold the car. There was no problem selling the car because of the forged documents, but there is still a different problem… the car needs to be returned to the rental car company.
Continue reading ‘Criminal creativity’
Posted in Creativity categories |
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Several years ago a friend of mine, who runs an Internet site selling wedding gifts, asked for some ideas to help him differentiate his site from the rest, and thus improve sales.
To find ideas, I decided to apply SIT’s Breaking Symmetry technique with the “wedding day” as the starting point.
© iStockphoto.com/fenykepez
To do that, I asked myself in what way is a wedding day symmetrical ?
One simple symmetry that came to my mind is the obvious fact that the husband and wife celebrate their wedding day at the same time.
This helped me come up with the virtual idea or pre-idea (something that is not an idea in itself, but triggers a thinking process that leads to an idea) of having some kind of wedding day that the husband and wife don’t celebrate on the same day.
Here is more or less my line of thought from there: Continue reading ‘“Happy Equality Day, darling”’
Posted in Ideation categories |
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