Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School When organisations look at innovation they tend to think of ‘creativity rooms’ and ‘idea spaces’. What they don’t see is creativity and innovation as a skill that individuals and teams can learn to apply. Many myths surround the generation of new and unique Ideas. Some organisations think they have to hire creative people. Some think that if you sit on bean-bags and take off your shoes, Ideas will come flooding in. The reality is that you can learn how to generate Ideas. Just like learning to play the guitar or golf, creativity is a skill you can learn, develop and improve. When using creativity techniques, you are guaranteed to generate many more Ideas than normal. The next stage is to sort or Harvest these Ideas. There is no right or wrong when it comes to sorting Ideas, the objective is simply to take a large number of Ideas and make them manageable. You now have a list of potentially great Ideas. The last part of the creative process is to Evaluate and Refine your Ideas. This requires you to separate your thinking into different aspects or perspectives. Holst is launching a 2 day training workshop called ‘The Innovator’s Toolkit’ in 2008. Based on Dr Edward de Bono’s famous creativity and innovation techniques, it teaches individuals and teams the secrets of innovation and shows them how to replicate as and when is needed.]]>