Creativity simply means creating something.Creativity is generally associated with flashy ideas with added touch of imagination. Creativity is all about thinking differently, dreaming of making impossible things happen.It is an attitude.
To be creative one needs to cultivate ability.One needs to look at world in different light.Person needs to have curiosity of a child..Young people are more creative than older ones as they haven’t conditioned their thinking.
Entire process of creativity can be broken down into several steps.Process of creativity starts with collection of information by keeping ears and eyes open. Second step is contemplation. Severe scrutiny of the information.
Dissecting the assembled information by asking questions.This needs intellectual curiosity. .This is followed by ideation.For ideation what is needed is shaking off preconceived notions, emotions. At this stage what is needed is a triggering mechanism. To create something new all you need is to take a subject and manipulate it in some fashion. One way of manipulation is to find substitution.
To check whether existing place, object, process can be replaced with alternatives.. It is a trial and error method. Similarly synthesis is another source of ideation. Synthesis is combining unrelated ideas to create something new .Another very common practice of ideation is adaptation. One needs to be original in adapting ideas from other domain to given problem at hand. An easy way of ideation is to look out for ways and means to magnify. Identify sources of value addition to the existing solution.
Look out for the gaps and ways and means to fill up those gaps. Similarly one can look out for possibilities of modification .Just about any aspect of anything can be modified. Once the idea is generated, it should be seriously evaluated. Evaluation can be done simply by comparing superiority of new idea with existing alternatives. Idea generated through the process of creativity is likely to invite criticism. Creative person should take such criticism constructively.
Person should look at such criticism objectively instead of brushing it aside with prejudiced mind. Listening to constructive criticism helps innovator in identifying problems in idea and finding out ways and means to overcome them.
Coming up with creative idea is just the beginning.Next big step is selling that idea.People are generally reluctant to accept radically new idea. So idea must be translated into simple and familiar concept.
Human brain is superior to computers.While computers work in linear fashion, human brain can work laterally as well as in a linear fashion.It has tremendous capacity to store and retrieve information.There are almost one million cells in human brain.This brain of ours has the potential to unleash thousands of ideas .This huge potential can also be tapped by cultivating creativity systematically.