Smart Tips: Innovation

Clarify the distinction between creativity and innovation with practical definitions that empower you to think differently and create a competitive advantage across your team.

Identify and break free from the four traps of certainty: certain people, times, segments, and processes that sabotage your innovation.

Explore how a whole-brain approach fuels innovation by connecting neural pathways across the brain. Embrace neuroplasticity and switch from the brain's highways to side roads to strengthen innovative thinking.

Explore how fear, comfort, and constraint sabotage innovation and learn to push through them with a practical exercise like Draw a Stranger.

Learn to recognize and name your lizard brain, use three breaths, and ask questions to overcome resistance to innovation in high-pressure meetings.

Discover how to activate flow state on demand through mental warm-ups, a 5-minute priming routine, and a worksheet to tackle a 15-minute focused task.

Manage energy as a finite resource by clearing mental clutter with a brain dump, then segment work into focused blocks and take movement or meditation breaks between tasks.

Discover three practical strategies to embrace fear and push through hesitation in innovation: assess fight/flight/freeze, feel the fear, and breathe to calm the nervous system and unlock your innovation.

Spot opportunities in everyday life by keeping your antennas up for innovative moments, linking personal observations to professional ideas, and capturing insights to apply to your world.

Explore how mental models shape attitudes and actions to uncover opportunities and drive daily innovation. Learn to build and unlearn mental models for proactive problem solving at work.

Discover how neuroplasticity and myelin enable you to rewire the brain for more innovative thinking by learning new skills and forming new neural connections.

Shut down confirmation bias to fuel innovation by engaging in three practices: play devil's advocate, seek opposing views, and step into another perspective.

Learn to separate creation and analysis in meetings by dedicating time to ideation first and critique later, boosting innovation and meeting outcomes.

Uncover how inciting questions challenge assumptions to unlock breakthrough innovation, moving beyond usual questions that anchor us to past solutions.

Explore how a 365-degree perspective from internal and external stakeholders reveals gaps, guiding a three-step process to craft more robust, battle-tested ideas for any challenge.

Learn to harness your brain's need to resolve open loops by framing how-to questions, turning unresolved thoughts into subconscious-driven innovation for big challenges.

Learn how to set expectations for innovation by embracing the Jay Curve, prepare your team for the dip, and guide ideas through early challenges toward an eventual upturn.

Reward the right behaviors to foster a culture of innovation, not just successful outcomes, by systematizing recognition for behaviors like taking risks, asking questions, collaborating, and helping others.

Explore three reasons brainstorms fail: lack of intention, focus on people over ideas, and catering to one type of person, and learn exercises to engage diverse thinkers and spark innovation.

Build collaboration by gathering the right people in the right conversations at the right time, inviting upstream and downstream perspectives to avoid consensus, debate, align on decisions, and move forward.

Learn to foster innovation by rewarding failure through three strategies: reward effort and learning, reward killing ideas, and reward smart experimentation, to encourage thoughtful risk and learning.

Learn to jump the business life cycle curve by focusing on the benefit your work provides, not what you do, and discover new curves like the Everyday Innovators Tribe.

Explore three phrases that foster a culture of innovation: 'I'm wrong', 'tell me more about that', and 'I don't know', to encourage learning, growing, and vulnerable conversations.

Master the language of innovation to win buy-in from decision makers by inviting collaboration with open questions. Ask what would you do to strengthen the idea to engage stakeholders.

Show how to get your team to see possibilities by making them feel pain from a problem, using milk campaign and Post-it notes examples, and prototyping to win buy-in.

Engage legacy thinkers to support change by showing empathy, honoring past work, connecting their contributions to the new direction, and using guided questions to include them in innovation.

Shift from perfection to progress by setting 80% expectations in the parking lot and celebrating 80% wins. Innovate first and analyze later to avoid perfection paralysis.

Discover your unique everyday innovator style by exploring the nine triggers of innovation. See how power triggers and a dormant trigger shape your approach to ideas and problem solving.