Business Tips
Unlocking Innovation
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- Category: Innovation
With some expert guidance, the proper tools, and a little practice, anyone can improve their creative thinking skills. "Once we accept that creativity is not a birthright, but a skill that can be taught and acquired, we can begin to seriously tap into the latent innovation potential inside all of us and across our organisations," Gibson says.
The Renaissance (of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries) ushered in an era of unleashed human potential, producing a slew of technological, artistic, and cultural achievements. It was an age in which invention and innovation could flourish.
Renaissance innovators such as da Vinci, Galileo, or Gutenberg, shared a lot in common with the innovation heroes we venerate today. If we could distil from our study of The Renaissance a key principle of creativity and innovation, it would be this: The breakthrough discoveries of that period were made not because people were simply connecting and conversing with a rich network of contemporaries from different fields, but because they were looking at the world from some refreshingly new and very particular angles of view.
There were four particular perspectives or patterns of thinking that became prevalent in The Renaissance period:
1. Challenging Orthodoxies: Questioning deeply entrenched beliefs and assumptions, and exploring new and highly unconventional answers.
2. Harnessing Trends: Recognising the future potential of emerging developments, and using these trends to open up new opportunities.
3. Leveraging Resources: Understanding our limitless capacity for redeploying skills and assets in new ways, combinations or contexts.
4. Understanding Needs: Paying attention to issues and frustrations others have ignored, and experimenting with new solutions to problems.
These four perceptual lenses were an important part of the recipe for Renaissance invention and innovation. And they can be an equally powerful formula for catalysing the innovation efforts of your business or organisation.
Reference: "The Four Lenses of Innovation: A Power Tool for Creative Thinking". by Rowna Gibson