DTO · EN
Industry needs creativity more than ever. In its simplest sense, creativity can be understood as a problem-solving process that produces a novel approach. A creative solution does not have to be art; it needs to be:
- New;
- Useful;
- Competent;
- Simple.
Put bluntly, if you copy an established solution exactly, it is guaranteed to be useful — and guaranteed not to be new. At the opposite extreme, if you choose your steps almost at random, you only have to make the process long enough for it to be novel — and very probably useless. For example, try driving to Vilnius without a map or geographical knowledge while beating the journey time predicted by Google Maps. Difficult.
New and useful should be understood as two poles: moving towards one takes you away from the other. For more on this, see Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications by Finke, Ward and Smith. However, this opposition exists only at the beginning, because a new product redefines its true usefulness over time. You probably know the misattributed quotation that the car would never replace the horse. Some initial quality is clearly essential, otherwise nobody would give that redefinition of usefulness a chance. A creative process therefore begins by improving one component of something established.
Watt’s steam engine and the iPhone were not created overnight; each had a substantial history. Many logical developments of existing products, individually simple, made the steam engine and the iPhone the outstanding creative achievements they are or were. The lesson is that trying to reinvent the wheel risks failure. A more effective approach is to question existing products, identify their inherent problems and solve them step by step. Creative thinking requires:
- Pressure to act, so that problems are recognised or people want to recognise them;
- Expertise to identify good solutions;
- Perseverance to take small steps, experiment and sometimes fail.
The following articles on creative tension will explore and expand on these aspects. DTO will explain practical methods for increasing creativity, including analogical thinking, abstraction and motivational strategies. To lighten things up, here is a small puzzle:
Move exactly two matchsticks, without removing any, to create a correct equation.
