The Posture for Creativity

“Truman Capote once described himself as a horizontal author, saying I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed on stretched on a couch’. There might be something in his posture, which led him to write incredible novels, Darren Lipnicki and Don Byrne at the Australian National University in Canberra have found that people solved anagrams  in about 10 percent less time when lying down compared to standing.” *

Hypothesis

The hypothesis for these results is that stress is the enemy of conceptual thought. When we are stressed we release cortisol amongst other adrenalines, which impede us from thinking about the big picture. Therefore finding a posture that is relaxing to you can play a role on how you think and come up with ideas.

This part of a new are of neurology called ‘embodied cognition’, which is that our body thinks right along with our brain. For instance ‘ you may think that you smile because you are happy, but in fact happy feeling arise in a large part from the psychical sensation for smiling. Furthermore in a study where people had their frowning muscles frozen through botox took longer to read sad or angry sentences. *

Experiment

1. Change your posture when you want to think creatively, find what makes you comfortable and see how much better your ideas flow.
2. Put a pen in your mouth and force your smile muscles to engage and feel how much happier you feel after 10 minutes.
3. For linear thinking stand up and physically move away from the problem.  Then give each thought a direction in a room. Walk each idea out, see how concise and practical your thinking becomes.

* The above quotes are extracted from New Scientist The Thinking Body 15 October 2011.

Can Innovation Learn From Buddhism?

IEA is currently studying how some of the principles of Buddhism can help innovation, as we have observed many parallels in their narrative. This is not to say that we have a bias towards Buddhism as a spiritual practice; rather, we are exploring it as an ancient thought process, which has successfully persevered for millennia across different cultures.

The crux of innovation is the idea. Ideas come from feeding your brain with diverse knowledge bases. When your brain perceives and understands a certain mechanism, it will then find a pattern from which it will continue to interpret. For example, we no longer have to ‘think’ about tying our shoelaces, because our brain has created a pattern for it. Taking this principle further, when looking to innovate we have to break away from established thought patterns – otherwise we will literally keep thinking within the same parameters.

There are many books and courses claiming that they have the secret to innovation; sadly, it cannot be bottled. There are some constants that we have observed in people that innovate: they are in a constant state of inquiry, they are great observers, and they march to the beat of their own drum.

So what can we learn from the Kalama Sutta, Buddha’s sermon to the Kalama people? In this ancient religious text, when the Kalama asked the Buddha how to tell which prophets were telling the truth, he replied:

Do not accept anything because of

1. repeated oral transmission
2. lineage or tradition
3. it being widely stated
4. it being written in books
5. it being logical and reasonable
6. it interfering and drawing conclusions
7. it having been thought out

From our observations, great innovators questions everything and do not settle for someone else’s ‘truth’.

Imagine if the Wright brothers would had been satisfied with the accepted theories of gravity? Or if Galileo had heeded the accepted wisdom of his time? Or if Darwin had been content with the Biblical explanation of creation?

It takes bravery to break away from tradition, popular thought and current dogma, but if you wish to innovate that is what you must do.

Why we still need engineers

In a recent article published in Forbes online, engineer Tom Gillis says that “the truth [is that] the era of the engineer is over”. We would say the era of how engineers had been used is over, not the engineer. He states that in the past, engineers were employed to make things “better, faster, cheaper”. This worked well in an era of profit at any cost, but what about now? What is the new role of the engineer?

According to Wikipedia, the word engineer is derived from the Latin word ingenium, meaning ’cleverness’. At a time when America and Europe’s economies are broken beyond easy repair, the Middle East is awash in political unrest, and our natural resources continue to deteriorate, how can ingenium not be at its most significant?

Engineers are furthermore known for their great analytical thinking drawing on science and mathematics, making them the gatekeepers of pragmatic and essential solutions.

Anyone, even an engineer, claiming that these attributes are no longer fundamental to helping us create better ways of doing things is not seeing the full potential of the engineer. However, our in house engineer, Daniel Gutierrez would argue that this is not  a new perception – ‘I studied engineering because I wanted to create better systems and now I use my skills to make entrepreneurs more productive’.  It is engineers that are moving the economy forward in countries like India and we are missing out if we do not create more in the UK and US. In the article Tom Gillis says that the future of an economy is service based- however we still need engineers to create a better economic system, create more environmentally friendly solutions, and even be part of political negotiations – who is leading solutions in difficult countries like Afghanistan or Iraq?

In Corporations

We often hear in the news of the struggling CEO at the helm of a company that is no longer performing the way it ought to be.  The usual response is to cut costs, and make things cheaper to manufacture to increase margins. However, what would happen if corporations were instead to hire engineers to create better systems, not only in production but also in the office?  Or include them as part of the innovation team to create better systems around the innovation process, as well as engineering better products and services?

In Enterprise

As part of the IEA team, we have an industrial & systems engineer.  However, instead of engineering mechanical systems to increase productivity on a factory floor, he creates productive systems of innovation for entrepreneurs.

Conclusion

The future of engineers is to be leaders of innovation, productivity, and improvement. We need more engineers, not to make things cheaper or faster, but to create solutions for a new era of economy and change. We would like to leave with one last thought from Albert Einstein – ‘Engineers create that which has never been.’ Creating that ‘which has never been’ never goes out fashion, it is human nature to keep creating.

The Business of Being Human

What We See

At a recent talk we attended by Carl Schramm, the CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, one topic that kept coming up was ‘How do you form successful firms?’ This led us to wonder what was at the core of a successful business. Our answer is ‘human beings’. It seems very obvious and common sense, but we do often forget to put the human at the centre when turning our ideas into businesses.

From our perspective, businesses are set up by humans for humans. Therefore understanding our own brain technology is important in creating a successful firm. There is no formula, shortcut, or A to B process for creating innovative businesses. It is about being aware of what humans need and then learning to effectively communicate the vision. We are seeing more and more businesses that take care to understand the human and therefore create mindful businesses. There is Be Social Change in NYC, who is run by behavioural psychologist; aLondon-based web company which uses psychology as a basis for their design, and a Dubai-based investment firm, which only invests in companies which will create a positive social impact.

Finally, putting the human back in the middle can help us create more visionary enterprises. We are reaching a saturation limit in creating companies that are only driven by profit and create little benefit to society.

Think About It

1. How much do you listen to your clients?
2. Does your services or product create a positive impact in the life of your clients?
3. How much time do you spend understanding how your clients think, what makes them trust, what their perception of value is?

We Innovate Communities

By Bethany Betzler

Lately, there is so much talk about innovation- what it is, and how to do it. It’s often applied in the spheres of tech and product development. But the New Oxford American Dictionary describes to innovate as: “to make changes in something established…”

That means that you can innovate nearly anything. When Idea Engineering Agency talks about innovating, it’s breaking through established forms of thought and action that we speak of, regardless of how Idea Engineering is applied.

Recently I sat down and drew a little map of IEA and where we sit as a company in relation to all of our other related activities. Each of us work on this process, but we also devote a fair amount of time to other entities as well: THECUBE in London, WeCreate in NYC, and the Detroit Creative Corridor Center in Detroit. Additionally, new projects are popping up all of the time. As I began to worry that perhaps we were moving in too many different directions, I asked myself: “is there a through-line?”

It turns out that there definitely is. In all of what we do, we are busy innovating communities. Araceli and Marianne are busy in London, working to create a new platform for an entrepreneurial community at THECUBE and throughout London, especially with Marianne’s new weekly column at The Independent. Daniel is hard at work building a new community in New York City, at the WeCreate space, where he is mobilizing the city’s forward thinkers towards a new way of creating economy and social change. And I am working everyday to establish a creative and entrepreneurial community dedicated to the City of Detroit. In the midst of all of these efforts, we are making observations, reaching out to those who can help us build and better understand the community we’re innovating, helping to broaden the minds to wake up to new potential, and creating broad yet meaningful peer-to-peer networks across industries, cities, and even nations.

You could break it down like this:

We innovate communities of innovation and enterprise

We innovate communities of sustainability and self-reliance

We innovate communities of 21st Century potential

And whether we are working directly with a company, a city, a group of concerned citizens, or even an entire nation, we are innovating a community of some kind.

This has major implications for the direction of our work. Once I saw this through-line, I realized that we are just getting started. All of our research and work satisfies a shared goal, regardless of where or how we do it or who we work on it with. This gives us real vision.

And at the root level of anything, there is a community, where its value is derived from the human potential of those who have the passion to serve it.

What if problems weren’t seen as a challenges but opportunities to learn new tools?

Our essays tend to be a bit on the long side, but for the purposes of time and our readers attention span, we are creating smaller entries. We are calling them ‘Business Wisdom’.

If one constantly perceives business challenges as problems, what does that do to our state of mind? Even the word challenge alludes to accepting a confrontation, which sets us on a defensive mode, causing a brain circuitry that is not conducive to cognitive thought.

Instead we have found that it is best to see the ‘problem’ as a tool. If for example, you are having a cash flow problem, instead of it being a problem or challenge, think this is an opportunity to innovate.

Low cash flow can be due to loss of clients, too many overheads, or a change in the market. Either of the three present an opportunity to generate new business tools  and become better entrepreneurs.

If it is a need to generate new clients, switch into an innovation mode. Find tools that will help your company be more innovative in order to create better services, customer relations, communication, products, etc.