Innovation and Thinking

Today I just had a fruitful and fun department training-cum-teambuilding event. Thank you so much to the training facilitator Michael Song for his passion and enthusiasm in sharing his insights on innovation. My deepest gratitude also goes to my colleague Man Wai and her team of helpers for their hard work in organizing this event successfully.

The training was about innovation. These are some highlights of the training which I find useful for me:


The end goal of innovation has to be crystal clear.

If you think well, execution is just matter of time. But if you don't think well, you're going to bump into all sorts of problems during execution.

In order for innovative solutions to surface, the problem definition has to be accurately formed.

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. ~ Albert Einstein

One of the methods for generating innovative ideas is the "Problem Reversal" method.

Example 1: Instead of asking "How do we get people to work?", try asking "How do we get the work to people?"

Example 2: Instead of asking "How do we get the production line to be more efficient?", try asking "How do we get the production line to be less inefficient?" or "How do we make improvements to the production line so that people enjoy their work more?"

One of the important factors for innovation is perspective.

Many times we see only things that we want to see, or things that we've been used to seeing, or even things that we've been trained to see. It is our failure to adopt fresh perspective that has caused innovation to die off in the process.

Can you read the message?

 

What do you see in this picture?

 

For the first picture, just by the squinting of your eyes, you'll be able to easily read the message "NO SEX CAUSES BAD EYES".

For the second picture, a 5-year-old kid would easily tell you that they see a few dolphins, instead of what you think  *Ahem*

You may share these with your friends if you find them useful.  :)