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3/03/2009

Cultivating Innovation: 5 Habits

Tom Kelley ( The Art of Innovation, Ten Faces of Innovation and CEO of IDEO) offers up 5 great habits in cultivating a personal mindset for innovation is this recent talk to Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. If you have 30 minutes to view his talk, I highly recommend it. But if your interested in the very abridged cliff notes version, here’s the habits:

  1. Think like a traveler: When you travel, especially internationally, your brain goes into a hyper-aware state, and notice little things that you don’t often key into noticing when your day-to-day. The trick is to cultivate this increased alertness in your daily life so that you’re observing more, you’re learning more and your gaining the competitive edge in more creative and innovative. “The real act of discovery consists of not finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes” – Marcel Proust

  2. Treat life as an experiment: You have to be willing to risk and fail in order to experience success. “If you treat life by an experiment you got be prepared for some stuff not to work out.” “Ideally your failing forward. You’re failing forward that has a little bit of learning attached to it.”

  3. Nurture an "attitude of wisdom: “Having a healthy balance between confidence in what you know and distrusting what you what you know just enough that keeps you thirsty for knowledge” It’s not a good idea to to rest on your laurels, especially in respect to learning. Bottom line stay hungry for knowledge - Keep learning!

  4. Use your whole brain: Find opportunities that help fine tune right brain activities. Education systems traditionally help refines the left brain. Find ways to stimulate and use your right brain, intuitive areas more. Also explore your “tortoise mind” – that area in your brain that work in the background for you.

  5. Do what you love: This one seems obvious... “Do what you love, because you’ll be better at it”

Awesome talk! Listen to the full talk here.

PS: Thanks Eric for twittering and leading me to this discovery. Great food for the brain before heading to bed.

2 comments:

Character Education said...

well these five points are correct, and i think these are the point which take your to a Good character person, so following only these 5 point will take you away of getting proper Character Education

Cheryl said...

Very interesting. I especially can relate well to #1 with living abroad currently. It'll be interesting to return to the US and see everything with new eyes.