The Innovation Diaries

Would your approach to fixing a problem work better if you were thinking smaller and not bigger?
When people talk about ideation you often hear well worn phrases being bandied about – with ‘a blue skies approach’ and ‘thinking outside of the box’ coming up all to regularly. But what if your approach wasn’t to think […]

French philosopher Rene Girard, spoke of the importance of having inklings. He also points out that there are 2 elements that make up inklings:
1) A vague sense of a whole
2) A glorious detail
The first is all about how you can have an out-of-focus perspective on a a problem, like a hovering cloud. The second is […]

Ever get stuck with a problem that seems insurmountable? Instead of trying to fix that precise part of the puzzle, why not take a step back and try solving it from a different angle?
“There is a classic case in which the tenants of a large office building complained about the increasingly poor elevator service. […]

People don’t set out to make bad products. It’s a truism, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful. Over at Wired they have an inteview with Ted Castranova, a social scientist at Indiana University, on the pitfalls he encountered whilst trying to create a video game based on the works of Shakespeare (although as […]

I was once told on a long airplane journey by a colleague that it pays to be patient and it pays to be bored. According to this colleague, he was convinced that for him, creativity lived in moments of boredom.
He told me that the best thing to do when feeling bored is to live with […]