5 Ways To Improve Your Creative Thinking

Creative thinking
creative thinking is generating and producing ideas through brainstorming,

visualizing, inventing, inferring and generalizing to think creatively is to produce
something new or different.
When thinking creatively students look outside the box to imagine other possible
packages containing various types of content
Characteristic of the creative thinker:

1. methodology: the creative thinker follows a well-defined problem with a
purpose in mind.
2) significance: the creative thinker demonstrates the highest cognitive domain
3) originality: the creative thinker arrives at something new.
4) result: the creative thinker produces something

5) Appropriateness: creativity manifests in new approaches that are appropriate
to the problem
5 Ways To Improve Your Creative

Thinking
Summer is the time for internships and summer jobs for many students, and it
is also a great time to work on your creative thinking and innovation skills so
you’ll be in good shape to get that dream job after graduation.
Everyone says that modern companies – including those which are most
popular to work for – highly value innovative thinking and creativity. The
problem is, how can you be creative without failing, looking stupid or repeating
what others have already suggested a hundred times?
1
For last few years I have been talking to various startups and have heard many
interesting recipes for innovation. Here are six ways to improve your own
creative thinking and innovation skills…
1. Create your own “Three Ifs”

Many good innovators take an existing object and ask clever questions to twist
the very concept of it and make it new. Steve Jobs didn’t start with the idea of
a smartphone. He just took an existing cell phone and asked a very simple
question: how can we improve it to make it better – or the best?
Let’s be clear about this – there are no universal recipes for innovation, and
each person should develop her or his own approach depending on specialty,
interest, type of thinking, or even the type of team s/he is participating in.
That said, I usually suggest my students build creative thinking around three
“ifs”:
(1) What would happen if I change it (the object/ system/ social relationship,
etc)?
(2) What would I change or improve about this object if I wanted to use it in 10
years?
(3) What would I do if I had a one-million-dollar investment to improve it?
These questions can become powerful tools that can help you to think
differently. It is important to exercise these skills by repeatedly using the
“three ifs” formula (or designing your own set of questions) about all sorts of
things. And many new ideas will pop up.
For example, for several semesters I kept asking my students, let us take a
bicycle, think about it and ask the “three if” questions, so we can come up with
a new idea. Initially the students strongly resisted and were very skeptical.
However, after several rounds of discussions and brainstorming they began to
come up with many new creative ideas. We narrowed down those innovations
into small course projects and my students’ teams won several cash awards to
implement their creative ideas.
2. Practice dreaming
The greatest paradox is that creative thinking is not necessarily the product of
IQ or enlightenment via the proverbial apple falling on your head. It is a matter
of regularly training your imagination, practicing your powers of observation
2
and dreaming, big or small. It sounds so simple, and yet in this era of
information overload and highly charged urban life, this important element is
often missing from our everyday lives.
All too often we stay focused on the main task at hand, devoting our mental
powers to routine actions (including Twitter and SMS – well, I am sometimes
guilty of this too), so that at the end of the day the most creative idea we can
come up with is just to finally take a break in front of the TV or computer
screen. Sound familiar?
Whatever you’re doing – whether it’s work or leisure – practice spending time
applying the “three ifs” formula to anything you see or imagine. This will help
you get into the habit of making space in your mind for dreaming – essential
for creative thinking and innovation.
3. Make time for cohesive creative thinking

Every textbook on creativity affirms to the importance of setting aside clearly
defined time for creative thinking and innovation. For example, Google asks its
teams to allocate at least 20% of their time to creative thinking or new
projects. But often, even if we show up ready to innovate, still something
doesn’t work and fresh ideas fail to pop up like popcorn. There are two reasons
for this stalemate. The first is that we don’t practice dreaming, and the second
is we don’t practice focusing on cohesive ideas.
Therefore, the next rule of creative thinking is very simple: allocate time – it
might be an hour per day or per week – in which to exercise creative thinking
about something specific. A colleague told me that when he was a student
many years ago he started musing about mobile phones – what they would be
in 10 and 20 years’ time. Already at college his essays on this topic won much
praise, and after college he got a cool job designing apps for phones to make
them much smarter and attractive for “millennials”.
4. Learn to pitch your ideas (in an elevator)

There is simple truth in the fact that Steve Jobs of Apple was great at exploring
and explaining innovations based on existing products – laptops, cell phones,
music players. He didn’t invent those products, but he made them better and
he was great at explaining why his version was superior to other competing
goods.
3
On many occasions I hear from my students, “But I had that idea first” or “I
proposed something like that just recently and nobody listened to me.” In this
situation I always highlight the bottom line – probably you did have a
wonderful idea, but you didn’t express yourself clearly and excitingly enough
to grab people’s attention, or help others to grasp the nature of your
innovation or project.
There is an old saying, “If you cannot express your idea in three sentences –
you don’t have an idea!” One of the most important innovation skills is the
ability to present a very short and clear description of a new idea (two to three
sentences – like shouting through the closing door of an elevator) and to make
a short presentation (two to three minutes – what is called an “elevator pitch”).
Like any other skill, the ability to articulate in this way can only come through
much practice.
5. Bounce ideas off others

Even a great innovator needs people around her or him to discuss – or
“bounce” – new creative ideas and innovations. What do the major innovative
ideas of our time have in common, from Microsoft (well, when it was young) to
Google? All of them were created by teams of people who stayed together to
conceive the idea, plan their innovative projects, take them to investors and
the public, and most importantly jointly brainstorm those innovations within
the team – bouncing ideas, questions and improvements until the product was
perfected to become the next multi-billion dollar “eureka.”
Therefore, a final important asset to add to your innovation skillset, is the
ability to be a valuable team player, capable of bouncing ideas to the next level.
For some young people this is very natural, while for others it does not come
so easily to be a team player. But it is never too late to train yourself in this
mode of interacting.
This article was originally published in August 2015 . It was last updated in April
2021
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Creative thinking

creative thinking is generating and producing ideas through brainstorming,

Characteristic of the creative thinker:

4) result: the creative thinker produces something

5 Ways To Improve Your Creative

1. Create your own “Three Ifs”

3. Make time for cohesive creative thinking

4. Learn to pitch your ideas (in an elevator)

5. Bounce ideas off others

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