CREATIVITY and INNOVATION
CREATIVITY
CREATIVITY
Creativity: What is it???……
• The process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies,
gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so
on; identifying the difficult; searching for solutions, making
guesses, or formulating hypotheses and possibly modifying
them and retesting them; and finally communicating the
results. (Torrance, 1966: 6)
• “The ability to create and innovate has been observed
throughout history and even though the fundamental tools
may have changed the ability has been prevalent in every
civilisation” (Hisrich, Peters and Shepherd, 2005, p. 8).
CREATIVITY
• According to Edward de Bono there is no doubt that
creativity is the most important human resource of
all. Without creativity there would be no progress,
and we would be forever repeating the same
patterns”
CREATIVITY
CREATIVITY
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CREATIVITY
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CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
BRAINSTORMING
• The facilitator writes down all the ideas on a large sheet
of paper or board;
• The participants call their spontaneous ideas as a
reaction on the problem definition;
• The participants associate on each other’s ideas;
• The participants do not express their critics on each
other’s ideas and;
• The participants try to do this at a high speed.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
• BRAINWRITING
• BrainWriting is a technique similar to brainstorming. There are
many varieties, but the general process is that all ideas are recorded
by the individual who thought of them. They are then passed on to
the next person who uses them as a trigger for their own ideas.
BrainWriting enables people who have ideas but are concerned
about voicing them in a broader group to anonymously make them
visible. They thus do not have to ‘compete’ with others to be heard.
It also helps that all ideas are visible and can be easily scanned to
trigger new ideas. It can speed things up because everyone is
offering ideas all of the time.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
MIND MAPPING
Mind mapping, also called ‘spider diagrams’ represents ideas, notes,
information etc. in far reaching tree-diagrams. To draw a mind map:
• Lay-out a large sheet of paper in landscape format and write a
concise heading for the overall theme in the center of the page.
• For each major sub-topic or cluster of material, start a new major
branch form the central theme, and label it.
• Each sub-sub-topic or sub-cluster forms a subordinate branch to
the appropriate main branch.
• Carry on in this way for every finer sub-branches.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
Five Ws and H
The ‘Five Ws and H’, are six universal question and are an influential,
inspirational and imaginative checklist. The technique uses basic
questions generating prompts:
The ‘Five Ws and H’ is a divergent creativity technique and can be used during
the early stages of problem solving to gather information and to define more
detailed the main (sub)problems to be solved. The checklist can be useful
either as an informal or systematic way of generating lists of questions for
which to find answers.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
SCAMPER
‘SCAMPER’ stands for the following seven kinds of potential product
changes:
S – Substitute – components, materials, people;
C - Combine – mix, combine with other assemblies or services, integrate;
A – Adapt – alter, change function, use part of another element;
M– Modify – increase or reduce in scale, change shape, modify attributes;
P – Put to another use;
E – Eliminate – remove elements, simplify, reduce to core functionality;
R – Reverse – turn inside out or upside down.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES
Analogies
Analogies are used to estrange the participants themselves from the original problem
statement and to come up with inspiration for new solutions and approaches. These
analogies can take a number of forms, which are presented in Table 1.