In the TEDx talk video below you have Tina Seelig, Professor of the Practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering of the Stanford School of Engineering, talking about creativity and innovation to answer the question: “Where do the ideas come from?”.
She lists six elements that she considers essential to unlocke creativity in order to innovate:
- Culture
- Attitude
- Imagination
- Knowledge
- Habitat
- Resources
They are divided into two groups: Focused on people (attitude, imagination and knowledge) and focused on the outside world (habitat, resources, culture).
The “outside world”·elements can be related to the potential of Open Innovation to stimulate innovation and the creativity, essential to solve challenges.
A culture of Open Innovation must favor collaboration and partnership between companies and solvers to face the challenges, find solutions and push creativity and innovation.
Also, this model provides resources and new habitats to accelerate innovation and development of solutions and new products. Open Innovation platforms are environments which cross challenges and solvers. They are a kind of new virtual habitat to stimulate solvers’ imaginations and also an effective and structured innovation resource for companies with challenges.
Connecting ideas, the Open Innovation culture
Seelig refers in the video to imagination as the capacity to connect and combine ideas in different ways and the capacity for challenging assumptions. This is also a characteristic of Open Innovation. Open Innovation offers a way of combining ideas and processes from different fields or companies. An effective way to refocus processes to develop new structures or products.
Finally, she talks about the motivation of innovators and entrepreneurs. They see themselves as posibiliteurs. This motivation appears in the Open Innovation platforms or spaces.
