Studies have shown that at 5 years of age children are 95% creative. By the time they are 12, creativity has diminished to 4%. This shows how schooling and maturity change the way children think and as they move more into adulthood, creativity skills are repressed.

Creativity is important, particularly in business to remain competitive, to provide opportunities for staff and to create a fulfilling environment which has no constraints on free thinking.

By transforming these creative ideas into action, companies can become innovate and leaders in their field.

Research has shown that highly performing companies are highly innovate and have successfully integrated innovation and creativity in their day to day business processes.

Interestingly though, most companies actually consider innovate to be very important. However, they rate low on the innovation maturity model.

So how do those highly innovative companies make the transition from being traditional structured thinkers to free flowing, open minded thinkers and implementers?

Step 1 – Innovation must come from the top and be embraced by the CEO, their direct management and their teams below. Innovative thought leadership must permeate throughout the organisation.

Step 2 – Innovative thinking can only occur when teams are cohesive, embrace change and are open to new ideas.

Step 3 – Everyone must support the companies vision or mission statement and know there are many ways to achieve these goals. Without this, not everyone is working towards the same goal.

Step 4 – Provide encouragement and motivation by rewarding staff for embracing and demonstrating innovative thinking.

Step 5 -Make the time to be innovative. If your teams are caught up in the structured day to day constraints of their operational tasks, there is little capacity for creativity or the time to innovate.

Step 6 – Be sure to have a process that harnesses and focuses creativity and innovation, as this is what will successfully turn an idea into a successful reality.

There are some fantastic courses and speakers available that provide techniques to assist with innovative thinking. Make the time to create your ideas and turn them into reality.

Do you wish to think more efficiently, to innovate faster, and to spur on your inner genius? Well, it is my contention that a good many of us do, I know I do. So, let me give you some thoughts on how I go about creating new ideas and concepts on a routine basis, and am able to come up with a couple of new and/or original thoughts per day. Not long ago, an acquaintance asked me to explain how I came about my ideas. Here is what I explained to him:

First, you must immerse yourself in new experiences, and seek out those things you would not necessarily learn or consider – differences of opinions, or things that you may not even like. But hang in there and reward yourself for sticking it out and indulging in something new, even if it is unfavorable. I guarantee you, you will get new ideas by combining these with your current knowledge and area of expertise.

You see, the ideas I come up with occur almost out of the blue sometimes, they just hit me, like; “why didn’t you think of this before” and then I have to go see if anyone else had, some ideas have occurred to others, sometimes not. But each time searching and reading, I find minute details, and thus, new ideas, and then it starts – my mind just goes into this phase.

Good thing about it is that I write it down or remember it for some other future concept. I might visit 1,000 websites, read through 40-research papers, read three books (or scan them for clues) by the time I move onto something else. Each time compounding the ideas, new concepts, and creating a library of thoughts to use later.

It appears to me that even if your concept is very simple and you cannot for the life of yourself figure that others had not considered it the prior, it still might be an original thought or close to it. If you search around to see if it was previously discovered you might find other concepts which are “remotely” similar, and perhaps superior or perhaps mostly inferior. Meaning you are definitely on to something.

In my thinking strategies, I generally include, grabbing some random visual “N400 brain wave memory imprint” and compare it to abstract designs, and then borrowing from 25 or so industries that I have studied up on, due to interests in past business endeavors, begin asking tons of questions, sleeping on it, and looking for deal breaking problems to focus on.

In studying my concepts, if I haven’t come across any real “deal killers” or come up against the laws of known physics I take it one step further, and begin looking at it from an entrepreneurial endeavor, namely the business start-up challenges, which are similar to all new business concepts, and regulatory issues which stifle all entrepreneurial activities, those one can deal with, if one chooses too, and if the ROI is so significant it warrants taking on that risk level.

Often, it’s more about attitude, willing events to occur, and just saying “screw it, let’s do it,” and we’ll figure the rest out later, as Howard Hughes used to say. And mind you that’s nothing new, I think Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Tesla, Edison, etc. all thought like that. Sometimes, you have to “go for it!” and victory goes to the bold. At least that’s what I’ve found to be. I hope you’ve enjoyed this dialogue and will contact me to kick around your latest concept?

Our focus is not fixed and it changes with time. We can change it using our own will and become more skilled and much more successful and happy in our relationships. It is a well-known fact. So how does the hunger for knowledge leverage the power of our innovations?

There are a few factors to it:

- our imagination feeds on what we have in our lives, as well as on the amount of emotions we put into what we do. The more you know about something and the more you love it, the more you see strength in the result of your actions. This is simply because you focus more on that particular topic and delete numerous others, and what you focus on expands.

-self-reliance

-by knowing more on a particular subject you are more aware of what might be needed in the present, from the past, and how the future will look like

There is no reason to invent the wheel again. When you realize that your mind is constantly seeking new inventions and solutions to your known problems, you may be amazed by the simple fact that if you knew more or expanded your mind you would be starting off from a totally different moment.

You would be looking to resolve much more complicated problems and invent the solutions to bigger challenges. And it also means being more useful to our earth and our ecosystem and thus becoming richer.

From such a point, intuition and knowledge seem to be fundamental laws to real innovation. When you combine knowledge with intuition, you may be amazed by the result. What we get in the present is the result of what we had in the past, what we thought of and concentrated on back then. These issues create our emotions and emotions bring future results.

Innovation is, as said above, the reaction of our mind to the situation that we feel may be resolved in a better way. When you develop your mind, you also upgrade the level of problems you deal with.

This is also called expansion. It is often used to describe the process in which great fortunes are being created – by expanding into new areas, what in fact might be just the ability to encompass the problems of much greater complexity with your mind being ready for it. You see yourself…