Encouraging Creative Thinking.

While sitting in Barnes and Noble eating a cupcake, I ran across a really interesting article in December's Harvard Business review entitled "The Innovator's DNA."  The authors argue that there are five skills that separate highly innovate people from the rest of us: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting and networking. They also argued that you could become more innovative by practicing the aforementioned skills.

So what exactly are these five magic skills?

1. Associating - The ability to make connections between seeming unrelated things. For example, an associative mind would understand the relationship between Chihuahuas and paint balls.
   
2. Questioning - Systematically challenging the world around you, trying to understand how and why things work the way they do.  Particularly, questioning the validity of basic assumptions.
   
3. Observing - Learning to see the world as it is and drawing insights, inspiration, and ideas from it.
4. Experimentation - Systematically evaluating your ideas, hypothesis; trying new things to see what happens; and of course, pushing any big red buttons you happen to see. 
5. Networking - Talking to and learning from other people.  I'm not sure Twittering counts.
   

 Basically, the authors of this article argue that curious people who talk to other smart people and systematically evaluate their ideas will come up with good ideas. At some level this is like arguing that the sky is blue.  However, I think it's not as obvious an argument as it seems at first glance.  Much of the way the world works is designed to discourage people from asking questions, exploring fields outside of their own, talking to other smart people about work, and trying new things.

Consider modern academia, much of it's structure is designed to discourage people from (1) exploring outside their own fields and (2) questioning consesus.  Many will argue that modern the complexity of modern science requires specialists and that inter-disciplinarity is a fools errand.  However, almost everyone will agree that when ideas from disaparte fields are meshed together surprising results will emerge.

Of course, academia is designed to speed the process of incremental innovation--adding a clock to whatever gizmo your professor dreamed up. It's not as well suited for promoting revolutionary innovation--proving whatever theory your professor came up with was a bunch of BS.  Which, I suppose is why revolutionary innovation is so rare.