A crash course in creativity: Tina Seelig at TEDxStanford

TEDx Talks
1 Aug 201218:16

Summary

TLDRIn this insightful talk, the speaker explores the origins of creativity, emphasizing the need to broaden our perspective on the concept. She introduces a model, the 'innovation engine,' which comprises internal elements like knowledge, imagination, and attitude, and external factors such as resources, habitat, and culture. The speaker illustrates how re-framing problems, combining ideas, and challenging assumptions can enhance imagination. She also stresses the importance of a conducive environment, highlighting the impact of physical spaces and organizational culture on fostering creativity. The talk concludes with an empowering message that everyone holds the key to their innovation engine and can unlock their creative potential.

Takeaways

  • 🧠 The speaker has been exploring the origins of creativity for 35 years, starting from a neurophysiological perspective and expanding into various real-world applications.
  • 🌟 Creativity is often viewed too narrowly; the speaker advocates for a broader perspective that includes both internal and external factors.
  • 🔄 The 'innovation engine' model consists of two parts: internal factors like knowledge, imagination, and attitude, and external factors like resources, habitat, and culture.
  • 🤔 The speaker emphasizes the importance of questioning and reframing problems to elicit creative thinking, drawing examples from education and humor.
  • 🔗 Combining and connecting ideas is a key method for fostering innovation, as seen in the Japanese art of Chindogu and the New Yorker's cartoon caption contest.
  • 🏗 Challenging assumptions is crucial for creativity; the speaker gives examples of exercises that push beyond the first 'right' answer to uncover more innovative solutions.
  • 🛠 Knowledge acts as a toolbox for imagination, enabling the transformation of ideas into actionable solutions, which requires continuous learning and attention to the environment.
  • 💡 Attitude is essential for innovation; viewing oneself as a 'quilt maker' rather than a 'puzzle builder' encourages the use of available resources to create something new.
  • 🏙️ Habitats, including the physical space and social environment, play a significant role in fostering creativity, with examples ranging from kindergartens to corporate offices.
  • 🌐 Resources, beyond just financial, include natural, processual, and cultural assets that can be leveraged to stimulate innovation.
  • 🎵 Culture, likened to background music, influences the collective attitude and behavior within a community or organization, affecting innovation.

Q & A

  • What is the main focus of the speaker's research and teaching?

    -The speaker's research and teaching focus on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on understanding and unlocking creativity through various means such as education, environment, and personal mindset.

  • Why does the speaker believe that the traditional approach to education may limit creativity?

    -The speaker believes that traditional education often emphasizes finding a single correct answer, which can stifle the development of imagination. This approach contrasts with fostering creativity, which requires thinking beyond the obvious and considering multiple possibilities.

  • What is the significance of the question 'What two numbers add up to 10?' in the context of the talk?

    -This question is used to illustrate the importance of reframing problems to encourage creative thinking. Unlike a question with a single correct answer, it invites multiple solutions, thus promoting imagination and the exploration of various possibilities.

  • How does the speaker suggest using humor to practice creativity?

    -The speaker suggests that humor, particularly jokes that involve a switch in the frame, can be a fun and everyday way to practice reframing problems. This practice can help in developing the skill of thinking creatively.

  • What is Chindogu and how does it relate to the speaker's discussion on creativity?

    -Chindogu is a Japanese art of creating 'un-useless' inventions. The speaker uses it as an example of combining ideas in unusual and surprising ways, which can lead to innovative thinking and unlock interesting ideas.

  • Why is challenging assumptions important in the process of creativity according to the speaker?

    -Challenging assumptions is important because it prevents people from settling for the first right answer or incremental solutions. It encourages them to think beyond the obvious and explore more innovative and potentially transformative ideas.

  • What role does knowledge play in the speaker's model of creativity?

    -In the speaker's model, knowledge serves as the toolbox for imagination, providing the raw materials that can be transformed into new ideas through the process of creativity. A depth of knowledge in a particular field is often necessary to bring innovative ideas to life.

  • How does the speaker define the 'innovation engine' and its components?

    -The 'innovation engine' is defined as having two parts: the inside, which includes an individual's knowledge, imagination, and attitude, and the outside, which encompasses the resources, habitat, and culture. These components interact to either foster or hinder creativity.

  • What is the significance of the physical environment, or habitat, in fostering creativity?

    -The physical environment, or habitat, is significant because it can either stimulate or stifle creativity. Spaces that are flexible, colorful, and filled with manipulatives can encourage creative thinking, while rigid, traditional spaces may do the opposite.

  • How does the speaker describe the difference between a puzzle builder and a quilt maker in terms of innovation?

    -A puzzle builder sees themselves as having a defined task with all the pieces needed to reach a goal, whereas a quilt maker leverages the resources around them to create something new and surprising. The speaker suggests that true innovators and entrepreneurs are more like quilt makers.

  • What is the role of culture in the speaker's model of the innovation engine?

    -Culture is described as the background music of a community, influencing the collective attitude and mindset. It affects how individuals think and act, and is intertwined with personal attitudes, making it a crucial component of the innovation engine.

Outlines

00:00

🤔 The Roots of Creativity

The speaker, a neurophysiologist turned creativity expert, shares her 35-year journey into understanding the origins of creativity. Starting with her academic background, she discusses her transition from studying cells to exploring creativity in various business environments and her teaching at Stanford. She introduces a model for unlocking creativity, emphasizing the need to broaden our perspective on the subject. The model consists of internal factors like knowledge, imagination, and attitude, and external factors like resources, habitat, and culture. The speaker highlights the importance of imagination, noting the lack of emphasis on it in schools and suggests ways to enhance it, such as reframing problems and combining ideas in unexpected ways, using examples like Chindogu and New Yorker cartoon contests.

05:00

🔄 Enhancing Imagination and Challenging Assumptions

Continuing the discussion on imagination, the speaker explains how the way we frame questions dictates the nature of answers we receive, using the example of the Copernican revolution. She also touches on the use of humor and jokes as a daily practice for re-framing. The speaker then introduces the concept of challenging assumptions, which is crucial for moving beyond incremental thinking. She shares an exercise she conducted with students at Osaka University, where they were tasked with creating value from the contents of a trashcan, leading to innovative solutions from participants worldwide. The speaker concludes this section by emphasizing the importance of knowledge as a foundation for imagination and the need to pay attention to the world around us to gain insights and solutions.

10:02

🛠 The Innovation Engine: Internal and External Factors

The speaker delves into the internal aspects of the 'innovation engine,' focusing on the importance of attitude and mindset in driving creativity. She contrasts the mindsets of puzzle builders, who follow a predefined path, with quilt makers, who leverage available resources to create something new. The speaker then shifts to the external factors of the innovation engine, starting with the concept of 'habitats,' which include the people we work with, rules, rewards, constraints, incentives, and physical spaces. She critiques traditional educational and office environments for their lack of creativity-stimulating features and highlights the importance of flexible, kindergarten-like spaces for fostering innovation. The speaker also discusses the role of resources, emphasizing that they are not limited to financial means but include natural resources, processes, and cultures.

15:04

🌐 The Interconnectedness of Innovation

In the final paragraph, the speaker discusses the interconnectedness of the innovation engine, represented by a Mobius strip, symbolizing that internal and external factors are inextricably linked. She illustrates how imagination and habitat, knowledge and resources, and attitude and culture influence each other. The speaker emphasizes that one can initiate the innovation process from any point within this system, whether by setting a culture as an organization leader or by building personal knowledge and passion as an individual. She concludes by empowering the audience, stating that everyone holds the key to their innovation engine and it's up to them to activate it.

Mindmap

Keywords

💡Imagination

Imagination refers to the ability to form new ideas, images, or concepts not present to the senses. In the video, imagination is highlighted as the starting point for creativity, but the speaker emphasizes that it is often underdeveloped in traditional education systems. The speaker provides examples, such as the Japanese art of Chindogu, to show how connecting and combining unusual ideas can enhance imagination.

💡Re-framing

Re-framing involves changing the way a problem or question is presented to explore new solutions. The speaker illustrates this concept by discussing how the way a question is asked can determine the range of possible answers, as shown in the example of asking 'What two numbers add up to 10?' instead of 'What is the sum of 5 plus 5?'. Re-framing is crucial for unlocking creativity and generating innovative ideas.

💡Creativity

Creativity is the ability to generate original ideas and solutions. The speaker describes creativity as something that can be unlocked through various techniques, such as re-framing problems, connecting disparate ideas, and challenging assumptions. Creativity is the central theme of the video, as the speaker explores how to cultivate it both in individuals and within organizational environments.

💡Innovation Engine

The Innovation Engine is a conceptual model introduced by the speaker to describe the interplay between internal and external factors that drive creativity and innovation. It consists of two parts: the internal components (knowledge, imagination, and attitude) and the external environment (resources, habitat, and culture). The speaker uses this model to explain how different elements work together to foster creativity.

💡Knowledge

Knowledge is described as the toolbox for creativity, providing the raw materials that imagination can transform into new ideas. The speaker emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the world to gain knowledge, using examples like the Stanford Safari, where students acted as naturalists on campus to gain a deeper understanding of their environment. Knowledge is a key component of the Innovation Engine.

💡Attitude

Attitude refers to the mindset, motivation, and drive necessary to engage in creative processes. The speaker stresses that without the right attitude, even individuals with strong imagination and knowledge may not reach their creative potential. Attitude is the 'spark' that ignites the Innovation Engine, enabling people to re-frame problems, challenge assumptions, and persist in the face of challenges.

💡Habitat

Habitat encompasses the physical and social environment in which creativity occurs, including the people, rules, and physical space. The speaker contrasts creative spaces like kindergartens or the Stanford D-school with traditional, restrictive environments like rows of bolted-down desks. Habitat directly affects imagination and creativity, as it can either stimulate or stifle innovative thinking.

💡Culture

Culture is described as the 'background music' of any community or organization, shaping how individuals think and act. The speaker highlights how culture is a collective attitude that influences creativity, using the example of how different musical scores in a video clip can alter perceptions. In the Innovation Engine model, culture is linked to attitude, affecting whether an environment encourages or hinders creative expression.

💡Resources

Resources refer to the tools, materials, and assets available in an environment that support creativity and innovation. The speaker points out that resources are not limited to financial means but include natural resources, processes, and even garbage, as demonstrated by the student projects using trash to create value. The availability and perception of resources are crucial in the Innovation Engine, influencing knowledge acquisition and creative potential.

💡Chindogu

Chindogu is a Japanese art form that involves creating 'un-useless' inventions—objects that are not entirely practical but spark creative thinking. The speaker uses Chindogu as an example of how combining ideas in unusual ways can lead to innovative outcomes, even if the initial invention seems impractical. Chindogu exemplifies the playful and exploratory nature of creativity, encouraging experimentation without fear of failure.

Highlights

The speaker has been exploring the origins of creativity for 35 years.

Creativity is often viewed too narrowly and needs a broader perspective.

The 'innovation engine' model consists of internal and external components.

Imagination can be improved by reframing problems and asking open-ended questions.

The way questions are framed determines the type of answers received.

Humor and jokes can be a tool for practicing creative thinking.

Innovation often comes from combining ideas in unusual ways.

Chindogu, the Japanese art of creating 'un-useless' inventions, encourages idea combination.

The New Yorker's cartoon caption contest is a source of inspiration for combining ideas.

Challenging assumptions leads to more innovative solutions.

An example exercise involves creating value from the contents of a trashcan.

Knowledge acts as a toolbox for imagination.

Paying attention to the world around us is a powerful way to gain knowledge.

The attitude of seeing oneself as a quilt maker rather than a puzzle builder fosters innovation.

Habitats, including the physical space and work environment, influence creativity.

Innovative companies create spaces that encourage creativity and playfulness.

Resources, including natural, financial, and cultural, are crucial for innovation.

Culture, like background music, sets the tone for innovation within a community.

The innovation engine's internal and external components are interconnected.

Everyone has the key to their innovation engine, and it's up to them to turn it.

Transcripts

play00:00

Transcriber: Yasushi Aoki Reviewer: Capa Girl

play00:04

What an amazing day!

play00:06

Filled with incredible ideas.

play00:10

So, where do these ideas come from?

play00:14

This is a question that I have been pondering for the last 35 years.

play00:19

Where do ideas come from?

play00:21

I started as a neurophysiologist,

play00:23

poking little tiny cells with even tinier electrodes

play00:26

to see what they would tell me about creativity and innovation.

play00:30

After I finished my PhD, I went out to study

play00:32

and sort of learn all about creativity in the wild,

play00:35

working in big companies and small companies,

play00:37

even started my own,

play00:39

and for the last almost 13 years I have been in Stanford,

play00:42

teaching classes on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

play00:46

And in my classes I have done endless experiments with my students,

play00:50

trying to figure out what is involved with unlocking creativity.

play00:55

What I’ve realized over the last few years

play00:59

is that we look at creativity in much too narrow a way.

play01:05

We really need to open the aperture

play01:09

and look at creativity in a very different light.

play01:12

And what I've done is put together a model

play01:14

that I'm gonna basically explain to you in next few minutes,

play01:17

about all the things we need to unlock creativity.

play01:22

And I wanna point out, before I take it apart,

play01:24

this innovation engine, that what I call it, has two parts.

play01:28

The inside is you:

play01:31

your knowledge, your imagination, your attitude.

play01:35

And the outside is the outside world:

play01:37

the resources, the habitat, and the culture.

play01:41

So let’s start, let’s start where most people start.

play01:44

Most people start thinking about creativity by thinking about imagination.

play01:49

So let’s start there.

play01:51

Now imagination, one of the sad things is

play01:54

that we don’t really teach people how to increase imagination in school.

play01:58

And so there really are ways to increase our ability

play02:02

to come up with really interesting ideas,

play02:04

we have to go back to kindergarten to see what the problem is.

play02:07

If you are in kindergarten, it’s very likely you get a question like this:

play02:11

What is the sum of 5 plus 5? So what is the answer to this?

play02:15

10! You guys are really smart, right?

play02:18

OK, we know it’s 10 because there is one right answer to this problem.

play02:23

But what if we ask this question in a slightly different way?

play02:26

What if we ask: "What two numbers add up to 10?"

play02:30

How many answers are there to this?

play02:33

Infinite! Infinite number!

play02:35

And this is critically important,

play02:37

something that many of the speakers have brought up today,

play02:39

is that the way you ask a question determines the type of answers you get.

play02:44

The question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall.

play02:49

And if you don’t ask a question in a thoughtful way,

play02:52

you are not gonna get really interesting answers.

play02:55

Consider the fact that the Copernican revolution came about by re-framing.

play02:59

The question, what if the Earth is not the center of the Solar System?

play03:02

What if the Sun is? And that opened up the entire study of astronomy.

play03:08

But you know what, you don’t have to do this in such a serious way.

play03:11

You can practice it every single day with jokes.

play03:14

Because most jokes we tell are interesting,

play03:16

because the frame switches in the middle of the joke.

play03:20

Consider this, the Pink Panther, if you see them in this movie.

play03:22

He walks into a hotel, there is a little dog sitting on the carpet,

play03:25

he says to the hotel manager, "Does your dog bite?"

play03:28

And the manager says, "No, my dog doesn’t bite."

play03:31

He reaches down. The dog basically attacks and he says, "What happened?"

play03:34

He says, "Well, that’s not my dog."

play03:37

(Laughter)

play03:39

Think about it!

play03:40

Whenever you hear a joke, you will find that almost always

play03:43

it's that a frame switched in the middle,

play03:45

and that is a really fun way to practice framing and re-framing problems.

play03:49

So that’s one of the ways you can increase your imagination.

play03:52

But there are other ways.

play03:54

One of the key ways is to connect and combine ideas.

play03:58

Most inventions in the world, most innovations come from

play04:01

putting things together that haven’t been there together before,

play04:04

often in really unusual and surprising ways.

play04:07

One of my favorite ways to practice this is with Japanese art of Chindogu.

play04:12

Chindogu is yard of creating un-useless inventions.

play04:17

They are not useful. They are not useless.

play04:19

They are un-useless.

play04:20

What they really are is a way of saying

play04:23

there might be something here, but I'm not quite sure.

play04:25

So in this example, with the umbrellas on the shoes,

play04:28

well, gee, it might not be very practical,

play04:31

but it unlocks some really interesting ideas.

play04:34

Speaking of shoes, here’s another Chindogu. (Laughter)

play04:37

OK. Little dustpans.

play04:39

Again, it might not be practical,

play04:41

but you know what, there is an interesting idea there.

play04:45

Again, you can use jokes for inspiration every single day.

play04:49

One of my favorite things, whenever I get the New Yorker,

play04:51

and I’m sure anyone who reads the New Yorker knows,

play04:53

the first thing you do is to open up the back cover

play04:56

and you look at the cartoon caption contest.

play05:00

The cartoon caption contest always puts things together that are not obvious.

play05:05

Often they exert out of scale, or things that would be

play05:07

very surprising to have in a same frame.

play05:10

And your job is to come up with a really creative way

play05:13

to connect these things in really interesting and surprising ways.

play05:17

So here’s a caption for this cartoon.

play05:20

It is, "We’ll start you out here, then give you more responsibilities as you gain experience." (Laughter)

play05:25

Now of course, you can come up with an endless number of other solutions.

play05:30

So there are two ways for you to increase your imagination

play05:32

but there is another that I want to bring up today.

play05:34

And that is challenging assumptions.

play05:36

One of the biggest problems we have is that we ask people questions

play05:40

and give them problems, they come up with the first right answer.

play05:43

So we are getting really incremental solutions.

play05:46

So what we do in our creativity class is we give problems

play05:49

that are really surprising where there is not one right answer.

play05:53

So here is an example what I just gave recently.

play05:55

This is the exact design brief.

play05:57

And I gave this actually to the group of students at the Osaka University,

play06:01

and their challenge was -- to create as much value as possible,

play06:05

value measured in any way they wanted,

play06:07

starting with the contents of one trashcan.

play06:11

They had two hours to do it.

play06:13

How do you like to do that?

play06:15

One of the interesting things about this assignment,

play06:18

and I put a lot of thoughts into framing the problem beforehand,

play06:21

is that trash actually has a negative value, right?

play06:24

We have to pay people to take it away.

play06:26

So what happens is these students ended up spending quite a bit of time

play06:29

and advanced diving into the project, thinking about what value meant for them.

play06:34

They thought about friendship and community and health and financial security.

play06:39

All sorts of things ended up in forming the way.

play06:42

They thought about the trashcan that they were going to use to create some value.

play06:47

To raise the bar even further, I gave them a little bit more of a challenge.

play06:51

I told them that I had sent a note ouot, which I did, to my colleagues around the world.

play06:56

And invited their students to participate at the same time.

play06:59

So there were students in Europe, in Asia, in the US and in Latin America,

play07:03

all doing the same project at the same time.

play07:05

So let me show you a couple of the things that resulted from this.

play07:09

A group in Ecuador started out with a garbage can filled with yard waste.

play07:14

Yard waste? I probably wouldn’t have them picked about a trashcan

play07:16

but look at how amazing thing they did!

play07:19

They turned it into a beautiful mural.

play07:21

Or a girl in Ireland, her mom had just gone through her brother’s sock drawer

play07:26

and at a whole trashcan of old holy socks,

play07:28

you know what she did, there were all the colors black, white, grey,

play07:32

she cut them out and sew them together and made this sweater.

play07:36

Pretty cool. I hope some of you will go through your socks drawer later today. (Laughter)

play07:40

So these are three things you can do to increase your imagination, right?

play07:44

Framing and re-framing problems,

play07:46

connecting and combining ideas and challenging assumptions.

play07:49

But unfortunately, this is not enough.

play07:52

You need to look at other pieces of the innovation engine.

play07:56

And one of the next pieces on the inside is your knowledge.

play07:59

Your knowledge is the toolbox for your imagination.

play08:03

Today we heard all about medical breakthroughs

play08:06

and about autonomous vehicles

play08:08

and why, how could they make this?

play08:10

These folks needed a depth of knowledge about medicine

play08:13

or about engineering to bring these ideas to life.

play08:16

Now, of course you can learn things

play08:18

by going to school, by reading books.

play08:20

But one of the most powerful ways to learn things

play08:23

and to gain knowledge is by paying attention.

play08:27

Most of us do not pay attention to the world around us.

play08:30

Not only do we miss opportunities to see problems we can solve

play08:34

but we also miss the solutions that might be in front of us.

play08:38

And one of my favorite ways to teach students is

play08:40

to send them out to a location they've been to many times before

play08:44

and I get them to look at them with a fresh eyes.

play08:47

But I’m not the only one who does it.

play08:48

I wanna tell you a quick story about a friend of mine Bob Siegel,

play08:51

who is a professor of here Stanford,

play08:53

who taught a Stanford sophomore seminar for two weeks

play08:57

and it was called the Stanford Safari.

play09:01

And the students basically over two weeks acted as if they were naturalists

play09:04

as if they were just like Darwin in the Galapagos

play09:07

but they were in the Stanford campus.

play09:08

And they talked to everyone they could to give a different point of view

play09:11

and perspective about Stanford.

play09:13

From the groundskeepers and the pest-controllers to the librarians and the organists

play09:17

and all the living Stanford presidents.

play09:19

They walked away not just with a deep understanding of Stanford,

play09:25

but an incredible appreciation for how important it is to pay attention.

play09:31

But, imagination and knowledge are not enough.

play09:34

Every person needs to have the attitude, the mindset, the motivation and the drive

play09:39

to solve the problems they are going to solve.

play09:42

If you don’t have that drive and that motivation,

play09:45

you are not going to connect and combine ideas.

play09:47

You are not going to re-frame problems.

play09:49

You are not going to challenge assumptions

play09:51

and go beyond the first right answer.

play09:53

Most people unfortunately view themselves as puzzle builders.

play09:58

They basically see themselves as having a very defined task

play10:02

and their job is to get all the pieces and put them together to reach that goal.

play10:06

But what happens?

play10:08

If you are puzzle builder and you are missing one or two pieces, what happens?

play10:13

You can’t reach your goal.

play10:15

True innovators, true entrepreneurs actually see themselves as quilt makers.

play10:22

They basically take all the resources they have around them,

play10:25

they leverage things, even the garbage cans, right?

play10:28

They leverage the materials they are available to them

play10:31

and create something that is surprising and really fascinating.

play10:36

This is incredibly important.

play10:37

We have to view ourselves as those who can leverage resources we have around us

play10:43

to really make amazing things happen.

play10:46

So this is our internal combustion engine for creativity.

play10:50

Our knowledge is a toolbox for creativity.

play10:53

Our imagination is the catalyst for the transformation of that knowledge into new ideas.

play10:58

And our attitude is the spark that gets this going.

play11:02

But unfortunately, that's not enough.

play11:05

And it’s one of the reasons why there's so many amazingly creative people

play11:08

who are basically not living up to their creative potential

play11:12

because they're not in the environment to foster and stimulate

play11:16

and encourage this type of innovation.

play11:18

So we have to look at the outside of the innovation engine.

play11:21

Let’s start first by looking at habitats.

play11:23

Now, habitats include several things.

play11:25

It’s certainly the people you work with.

play11:27

It’s the rules. It’s the rewards. It’s the constraints. It’s the incentives.

play11:31

But even more than that, it’s the physical space.

play11:35

Consider the fact when we were little, when we were kids in the kindergartens.

play11:38

There are stimulating environments you walk in.

play11:40

You know it’s a place you supposed to be creative.

play11:43

It’s colorful, there are lots of manipulatives.

play11:45

Your rooms are very flexible.

play11:47

But unfortunately, you graduate from this type of environment

play11:50

and you get to go study somewhere like this!

play11:52

(Laughter)

play11:54

The chairs are aligned up in rows and columns.

play11:56

They are bolted to the floor.

play11:59

And if you talk to anybody, you get into trouble.

play12:02

I spent my entire growing up writing, "Silence is golden. Silence is golden."

play12:06

OK. And the fact is we then get very upset because the students,

play12:10

you know, they are just not so creative anymore

play12:12

and everyone laments that!

play12:13

And then if you are successful in this environment,

play12:15

and you go after this environment where they work. (Laughter)

play12:18

And I know why you are laughing because it’s all too familiar.

play12:21

These type of offices were designed to be like prisons.

play12:25

And unfortunately what happens is we again get very frustrated

play12:29

that people working in these type of environments are not very creative.

play12:32

The thing is that space we're in tells the story.

play12:36

Every space is the stage on which we play off our life.

play12:40

And it tells us what role we play, how we should act.

play12:43

I'm fortunate enough to teach at D-school, these are actual pictures of my class.

play12:47

Now it might look like the kids are back in kindergarten.

play12:49

They were actually working on a very sophisticated problem here

play12:52

as are the students in this picture.

play12:55

But the room is much more like a kindergarten space

play12:57

with lots of manipulatives, lots of things to prototype.

play13:00

The room is set up like a theater

play13:02

we can set it up differently every five minutes,

play13:04

depending upon what we want to do.

play13:06

Nothing is bolted down.

play13:08

Really innovative firms know this well.

play13:11

This is the picture from Google in Zurich.

play13:13

This is the picture from Pixar.

play13:15

These are not frivolous because these are messages

play13:18

that the companies giving to the employees that's saying,

play13:21

"Innovation, creativity and playfulness are valued here."

play13:25

But this is not enough.

play13:27

We also have to think about the resources we have in our environment.

play13:31

And resources come in so many different flavors.

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Unfortunately we think of resources as things like money.

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And money is a fabulous resource,

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we certainly benefited from here at Stanford and Silicon Valley.

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But it’s one of many resources that we have available to us.

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We need to look at the natural resources.

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We have to look at the processes we put it in place.

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We have to look at the cultures we built.

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Unfortunately, I get a chance to see this happening in different places in the world.

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I was up in the northern Chile recently.

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And it was absolutely spectacularly gorgeous.

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Up to the north of Chile, the beach was endless, 3,000 mile beach.

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And Andes are there.

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And I said to the people at the town of Antofagasta,

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"Gee, what’s really getting in the way of your success?"

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And this man said to me, "Well, it’s a really horrible environment."

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I said, "Really? Did you look outside?"

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Because they didn’t see.

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They were trying to replicate the resources someone has somewhere else.

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As opposed to seeing resources they already had.

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So here, picture of this city.

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Think of the culture there. Culture is important.

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Culture is the last piece of the innovation engine.

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Culture is like the background music of any community,

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of any organization, of every team and of every family.

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And I'm gonna play two video clips to demonstrate this.

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Think of the music in these video clips as the culture in each of these scenes.

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And I'm gonna play the same clip twice.

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This is a clip from 1919 Coca Cola bottling factory.

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OK? And I want you to think about how you feel,

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whether you'd want to be there and what you think is in those bottles.

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[Bottles are automatically conveyed to syrup filter.]

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(Merry music)

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[Syrup is injected by sanitary mechanical process.]

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[Carbonated water is added.]

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OK, then we’ll go to the next one.

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[Bottles are automatically conveyed to syrup filter.]

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(Gloomy music)

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(Laughter)

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[Syrup is injected by sanitary mechanical process.]

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[Carbonated water is added.]

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OK, you get the point, right?

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So the fact is, this is the outside of your innovation engine.

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Let’s put it all together.

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Now you might say, "OK Tina, that’s really interesting.

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But how come you have this fancy Mobius strip here?

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You could just have it inside and outside."

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But it’s the Mobius strip because inside and outside

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are completely woven together.

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And nothing can be looked at isolation.

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Let me show you how.

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Imagination and habitat are parallel here.

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Because the habitats we build are the external manifestation of our imagination.

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If you can imagine it, you can build it.

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And in addition, the habitats we build directly effect our imagination,

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the way we think, the way we feel, the way we act.

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This is also true with knowledge and resources.

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The more we know, the more resources we can unlock.

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And more type of resources we have that determine what we know, right?

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The more we know about fishing, more fish we are going to catch.

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The more fish we have in our environment, more likely we know about fishing.

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This is also true with attitude and culture.

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Culture is a collective attitude of the community,

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and the culture clearly affects how each of us thinks.

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The wonderful thing though is this Mobius strip

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of the innovation engine is so powerful that you can start anywhere.

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If you are the manager of your organization, you can set up --

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You can think about the culture and set up the culture.

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You can build habitats to stimulate imagination.

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If you are an individual, you can start by building your base of knowledge.

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You can start with a passion and attitude that you're gonna solve a problem.

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You can start anywhere to get this innovation going.

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Most important thing is that everyone,

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everyone has the key to their innovation engine.

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It’s up to them to turn it.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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Related Tags
Creativity UnlockedInnovation EngineImagination BoostKnowledge ToolboxAttitude DriveProblem ReframingChindogu ArtCultural ImpactHabitat DesignResource Utilization