Creative Thinker’s Toolkit for Innovation & Design Thinking

Posted in Blog, Boost Your Brainpower, Create, Design Thinking, Innovation by Jo North

The Creative Thinker’s Toolkit

The creative thinker’s toolkit is collection of methodologies, practices, and tools, helping to generate great ideas for business results.

The Foundations: Understanding Creative Thinking

The creative thinking process is more than just generating new ideas. It’s a systematic approach, grounded in the latest scientific research, to innovate and create meaningful changes. Creative thinking is about seeing new possibilities, even in everyday life, and exploring new ways to solve the biggest challenges in the professional world and personal life.

A powerful tool to help with this is the creative thinker’s toolkit. But, how does it differ from the critical thinking toolkit? The latter is focused on evaluation, discernment, and decision-making. In contrast, the creative thinker’s toolkit embraces the unknown, explores emotional connection, and births innovative problem-solving strategies.

Creative Thinker’s Toolkit – Free Resources

If you’d like to explore science-based, actionable insights that you can use to become an even better creative thinker, take a look at my suite of free resources here:

Practical Tools and Techniques

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process often used in the realms of industrial design and engineering design. It places emphasis on empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing.

Here are some great, free resources to get you started with design thinking:

Service Design

As highlighted in Lucy Kimbell’s “Service Innovation Handbook,” this approach looks at how service organizations can deliver innovative services that resonate emotionally and functionally with users.

Take a look at my free guide to Customer Journey mapping here:

Thinking Routines

Daily habits, or thinking routines, can bolster your innovative mindset. Setting aside time for brainstorming, hands-on activities, or short video lessons can sharpen your innovative abilities.

These free resources will support you with your own thinking routines for creativity:

Training Exercises

There are great courses, audiobooks, and even great books that offer training exercises to enhance the creative process. Immersing yourself in these free materials can help you refine your skills:

Personal Experiences

Drawing from family life, personal challenges, or even travel can provide unique insights for innovative thinking. It’s about making an emotional connection with the problem to discover the best solutions.

Creative Thinker’s Toolkit: Collaborating for Success

In the realm of innovation, team members play pivotal roles. Today’s employees are not just executors; they’re potential innovators with creative potential. Involving them in the creative process, sharing personal experiences, and collaborating on hands-on activities can lead to big payoffs.

Use these free resources to build collaborative strategies and techniques into your Creative Thinker’s Toolkit:

Navigating Challenges

One of the biggest challenges in the business world today is ensuring that innovation doesn’t remain confined to brainstorming sessions. It needs to translate into profitable idea generation. Here, a blend of both the creative and critical thinking toolkit is essential.

Creative Thinker’s Toolkit: Next Steps

In the modern era, where policy contexts, technological advancements, and social innovation shape the industrial and service sectors, there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ formula. However, with the right tools and a better understanding of the creative process, you are in the right place to drive innovation.

If you’re looking to further understanding, it would be beneficial to dive into some good examples from successful entrepreneurs and learn from their journeys.

Watch the videos here for some examples of inspiring entrepreneurs in action.

Practical tools, combined with the personal touch of emotional connection and the diligence of everyday application, make the creative thinker’s toolkit an indispensable asset not only in professional life but also in everything we do.