Innovation All The Time With These 8 Awesome Tips

There's a greater need for innovative teams as competition among companies and marketshare is fierce, and more organizations are starting up innovation labs and departments of disruptive change. If you're a company owner, manager, or an employee climbing the ladder, you need to stay innovative. 

Here are 8 tips that will inspire greatness:

1. Fail: Think of Thomas Edison's famous statement: "I did not fail. I simply found 10,000 ways that didn't work." When you are afraid of failing, you're unable to try new solutions, or speak your mind about a way forward. Those who generate ideas aren't afraid of falling short--if one bombs, they'll just generate more.

2. Riff: It's like jazz: you're working with a team and riffing off your colleagues like Coltrane off of Miles Davis. Don't think of yourself as a lone ranger, but rather like a jazz musician: take people's ideas and riff off them. If you don't know how to do that, check out documentaries of famous jazz musicians like Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock.

3. Look for synthesis: Often people think of ideas as tiny atoms that are isolated. But when you take three people's ideas and sync them together, you possibly come up with something greater. People like synthesizers. If you're a manager, look for synthesis, especially if you have a team of people who love their own ideas and won't move forward unless their ideas are included in the plan. People want to contribute--that's why they love synthesizers.

4. Push the idea to its limit: You need to kick the tires on an idea to see if it'll survive disruption. To do this, come up with wacky scenarios--in our crazy world, there's no such thing anymore as wacky--and run your idea through them. See where the points of failure are, then redesign it.

5. Use divergence: What do mountain ranges and self-driving cars have in common? Or what about bats and mobile technology? Typically, we use the same kind of thinking for old ideas as we do with new ones. If you take two seemingly unrelated things and fuse them together, you'll get a totally different picture of your solution. Don't look all the time for similarities of things, but rather the links between unrelated things.

6. Lock down: Think of your meeting room as an incubator tank. Make it comfortable with food and plenty of caffeinated drinks, and magazines, and cool design books, and plants, and large whiteboards, and Lego toys, and anything else you and your team enjoys--then lock yourself in. Spend a week in that place. Take plenty of photos of your work. Stay there till something awesome emerges.

7. Get outside: Steve Jobs was a master of walking outside during meetings. It's important to get outside, clear your mind, and get your body moving. And did you know that walking provides oxygen to the brain? You're actually being smarter by walking around the block of your office building. 

8. Learn about creativity: There's a lot out there on creativity, from TED Talks to books to articles. If you're a manager, get your team to learn everything it can about creativity, then assign everyone to bring 5 new practices to the next meeting. Create new habits around what you've learned.