David Kelley on Creative Confidence, Innovation & the Power Of A Child’s Mind

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"The hardest part that people find with design thinking is the notion that you have to kind of suspend your natural tendency to want to come up with a bunch of quick ideas. The problem with that is those are cliched ideas that anyone can come up with."      

 

What a child's fearlessness and the power of design thinking can teach us about business success and technological innovation.

According to renowned entrepreneur, designer and visionary David Kelley from IDEO everything you need to know you learn it in kindergarden because that's when you had innate confidence in your own creative power.

More about IDEO here.

Ideation and diversity: a short lesson from David Kelley


(via d.school)

This year the d.school's Design Thinking Bootcamp gathered students from the seven schools of the university. In this short video David Kelley talks about the importance of diversity in the generation of unique ideas. In a brief explanation Kelley enhances two particular advantages of this concept, fluency and flexibility. Diversity is fluent since it provides the ability to generate loads of different ideas and flexible as it allows those ideas to differ from each other. 

Diverse environments present the opportunity to find a wider range of different ideas in many different ways. Gathering minds from different disciplines or backgrounds enriches the ideation process with sundry perspectives that complement and reinforce the originality of the results. Diversity as Kelley points out, takes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to seek for inspiration in new places.

Diversity also provides a flexibility to the ideation process that homogeneous environments don't. The more minds thinking around an opportunity, the more perspectives and the more variety in the solutions the process will gain. The diversity in these approaches will also generate more knowledge around the opportunity and allow the opportunity to stumble across unknown opportunities and challenges.

Diversity should be sought, embraced and encouraged in creative environments to achieve truly innovation. The generation of own ideas shouldn't be the goal of the creative process but the ability to be open to other people's ideas and approach them in a different way to improve them and build upon those 'bad ideas'.