Creativity and Innovation
Today we would like to celebrate with you the International day of Creativity and Innovation writing an article in our blog about how we understand it.
Everyone of us has a friend who considers creative and innovative, who is always looking for new and brilliant ideas in things we see normal and tedious, ideas we would never come up with. It is normal to hear, “he/she is very creative” or ” I am not creative at all”. We believe that feature of creating new things is something many are born with, while others simply do not have, it is like if the first had a divine touch which gives them the ability.
In DesignThinking.gal we think we all are creative and that creativity is not a privilege you are born with. Therefore, to prove it, we would like to share our thoughts with you:
We can start talking about the more biological explanation and how the education system makes that happen.
We live in a society where education is based on the development of the ordered and structured capacities, on the reasoning against emotions and on rational thinking. The education is focussed on working that kind of thought and its development is much bigger than the activities based on emotions and artistic thought. That is why, as a general rule, the left hemisphere of the brain, tasked with the rational and structured duties prevails over the right hemisphere, tasked with the chaotic and creative thinking, which is less developed.
From this simple analysis based on the education system, we can conclude that the difference between the called “creative and non creative people” is simply based on the work and the training of those capacities. Thus, we can state that the creativity can be trained and therefore improved.
In addition to the biological factors, there are other key factors that are crucial to our creative capacities:
One of these key factors is the confidence. The confidence in ourselves is determined by the circumstances and personal experiences lived throughout the years. I will start sharing a very familiar example: there are many ways to make people laugh, but one of the traditional ones is a fall or an involuntary accident of a person of whom everybody laughs off. Well, in that situation there are two ways the person can react, first, being ashamed and second, getting up and keep walking as if nothing had happened. Many times a person’s laugh makes a humiliation to the other, depending on how we take it. Now, just imagine we change the frame of the scene and that person is wearing a red ball on his nose and an enormous pair of shoes, what would you think? Nothing has really changed, just that the person who fell has a protective shield in the form of a clown costume which protects him from the other’s opinions and will not make any influence on his future decisions.
In the same manner, imagine now a primary school where a kid is drawing something very different from what the teacher asked for, he is told off about it and the other kids in the classroom start laughing at him because of that. However, when we see what the kid was drawing, we can see that his drawing extraordinarily good or simply different, ¿how do you think is the kid feeling?
These little experiences which are quite familiar to all of us, when they happen in different ways throughout our lives, especially during our early years, that feeling the kid felt makes our confidence smaller and smaller and causes us to take less risks in our actions and decisions. We simply stop exposing ourselves to the other people’s opinion by saying no to participate in something or not saying what we truly believe, because we are afraid and we do not want to feel ashamed anymore.
From Designthinking.gal we want to help you to recover that confidence and start working out the right hemisphere of the brain to boost the creativity we all have and light up the spark which makes the difference between a good work and an amazing work.
Because the creativity is the base of the innovation, because the new ideas that are going to set our company one step ahead of the competence, are going to come from our creative thinking, they are going to be created in minds free of loads, procedures and prejudices. If we want to innovate first we have to think in a creative way. There is no other way around to that, as the theorists say: “you can be creative and never innovative, but you cannot be innovative if you are previously creative”.
We launch a challenge to celebrate the International day of Creaticity and Innovation: make something different from what you normally do (a little thing, a little change on the routine,…) it does not have to be very big or spectacular, but that little first experience is going to help you recover the lost confidence, to work the right hemisphere of the brain and start getting our creativity back.
Os proponemos a todos que celebreis con nosotros el Día de la Creatividade e de la Innovación haciendo algo que normalmente no haceis (unha pequeña cosa, un cambio de alguna rutina, …). No tiene porqué ser nada espectacular, pero será esa primera pequeña experiencia para recuperar la confianza, trabajar ese lado derecho del cerebro y empezar a recuperar nuestra creatividad.
Because, as Albert Einstein would say: “Creativity is intelligence having fun”, now we say: Who does not want to have fun?
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