Creativity is an essential ingredient for innovation as innovative ideas lead to new products and services. This, in turn, boosts your sales and generates new profits. Okay, okay, so plain and simple it is not! But there’s no doubt that being a creative problem solver is vitally important to thrive in today’s fast changing and increasingly demanding markets. But how to be creative? Although there’s no direct prescription on how to turn yourself into a creative problem solver there are ways you can, over time, train yourself to it. Here is my ten. Take it or leave it. I am not a creativity expert (actually, I am very far from it by my formal training), but I’ve found these ten ways of thinking/doing things helpful to come up with the solutions otherwise difficult to attain through the traditional way of thinking/working.

1. Challenge the status quo! Not because that the existing solution necessarily is bad but to force unconventional thinking, ultimately leading to new and better solutions.
2. Set ambitious, nearly unrealistic goals and work toward achieving them! You’ll be surprised at how creative your potential solutions will be. And although you might not reach your original goals fully your learnings along the way will be invaluable for both solving your current problem and making your future efforts more successful.
3. Create artificial constraints! While working under constraints might close one side of your hard-working brain the other will open wide to generate a set of entirely different solutions.
4. Be ready to experiment and have fun with it! Don’t think that every experiment you’ll conduct will have desired outcome, but remember experimental failures are part of a creative problem solving process and generate valuable knowledge that is otherwise hard to gain.
5. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! Mistakes, like experimental failures, are part of a creative problem solving process. Stay cool and try to learn from them as much as you can.
6. Think opposite and turn the problem around! If your goal is to make something quicker (for instance, decrease waiting time to certain service) try to think of the opposite, that is, how to make it slower instead? This will give you new insights into the factors influencing the lead times, eventually helping you to come up with a new solution to your original problem.
7. Make it worse! Imagine the problem you are trying to solve was 10 times more severe than it actually is, how would you go about to solve it? Although this is just a virtual exercise it will surely trigger new, perhaps more radical ideas you have not thought of before.
8. Record creative ideas as you come up with them! You’ll soon end up with a set of potential solutions to multiple problems you have encountered before. Try to go through them once in a while to see if they can be applicable to your current problem as well. Also, don’t hesitate to combine these potential solutions. After all, creativity is all about connecting things in time and space.
9. Draw, photograph or film instead of writing! Using different means to describe a problem to be solved, a need to be met or an opportunity to be taken will stimulate new ways of thinking and ultimately produce solutions much different from the ones you’ve thought of before.
10. Hang out with creative people! Finally, and this is my all-time favorite. Do you want to become more creative? Find people who are creative in their actions or at least in their thinking and try to hang out with them. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you will acquire the creative habit!

Alright, this was a brief overview. I hope you’ll find it useful. Have you practiced some of these things or have new ones to share? I’ll be happy to hear from you!