Creativity and Innovation

1-Day Course on How to Master the Art of Problem Solving, Decision Making & Creative Thinking

Training Course Description

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create."
Albert Einstein

The recent significant progress in technology has increased our communication and reach and this has made the environment highly competitive. To survive in this competitive market, people need to do everything they can to stand out and win or risk falling to the bottom. It is now clear that those who innovate and use creativity in their roles in just about any job stand to succeed while those who don't use all the resources at their disposal may be overrun by others.

Creativity is not something people are born with; it is a skill. Like any other skill it can be mastered and channelled towards specific goals with incredible results. This one-day course attempts to teach people how to be creative using specific set of tools and techniques. Significant research and studies have proven that such techniques will increase individual's creativity.

Innovative organisations don't rely on geniuses to create the next best product or service. Instead, they work hard to create an innovation-friendly environment that energises the staff and helps to bring the best out of everyone.

This carefully designed course contains several step-by-step guides to teach delegates how to increase their creativity. The workbook and the trainer notes contain everything a trainer needs to teach delegates about creativity. You can't learn creativity unless you practice it. Extensive exercises with detailed instructions allow the tutor to guide and monitor the delegates in exercises based on the techniques discussed in the course. Optional exercises are also provided to train those delegates working within a team on creative brainstorming and problem solving.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Introduction to Creativity
• How can you be innovative?
• What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence?
• What are the tenets of creativity?
• How to put yourself in a position where you can benefit most from the unexpected?
• How to be aware of issues on predicting the future based on the past and how does this relate to creativity and innovation?

Principles of Creativity
• Why do you need to separate idea generation from evaluation and what does it mean in practice?
• How to create as many ideas as possible in the shortest amount of time?
• What is Confirmation Bias and how does it relate to creativity?
• How to identify and avoid bad habits to increase the likelihood of coming up with novel ideas?
• How to expand the search space of possibilities systematically without getting drowned?
• How to avoid patterned thinking?
• How to avoid negative thinking?

Process of Creativity
• What are the 4 stages of creativity and how can they help you to come up with novel ideas quicker?
• What is Expanding Problems Technique?
• How to manage risk?
• What kind of attitudes can kill creativity and how to avoid them?

Creativity Techniques
• How to think in groups to use everyone's inputs efficiently?
• How to take advantage of random?
• How to use opposites to create a large number of associations and produce new concepts?
• How to take advantage of the immense visualisation power of the brain and create many associations systematically and with ease?
• How to combine the power of matrices, opposites, tree diagrams, related keywords, etc. to systematically search the space of possibilities and generate new thought?
• How to ask questions from yourself or from others to increase the chances of coming up with better solutions?
• How to encourage others to look beyond the status quo using a systematic tool?
• How to use provocation and challenge to generate new ideas?

Audience

Anyone

Prerequisites

None

Course Duration

1 day

Course Level

Beginners & Intermediate

Delegates will learn

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:
• Identify principles of creativity, innovation and serendipity to increase your productivity and imagination
• Mind Map to increase your creativity, memory and knowledge capturing productivity
• Approach creativity in a step-by step process and use proven practices to increase your inventiveness
• Use several techniques to quickly create a large number of options and alternative solutions to your problem using a systematic approach
• Use lateral thinking techniques and indirect approaches to increase your creativity
• Find the root cause of problems efficiently using a systematic approach
• Use the Six Thinking Hats technique to increase the efficiency of brainstorming sessions of any kind