What Can You Do To Be More Creative, Innovative?

The moment people hear Creative, Innovative, they think about a BIG change. Things though do not work out that way always. True, your first step might be Innovative like Uber. The idea to make a platform for booking cabs was innovative. It was a true runway where the Uber flight took off. But after that Uber had to do small things to execute the operations. These small things may be incrementally creative & innovative. But it need not be like the first big step of Business concept. The Big innovation lies only up to the first step. While executing, it is always small things that matter. One famous example is always given in case studies. In one of the fan factories, once a box went without a fan. There was a customer complaint. A big team then sat for brainstorming on deciding a way by which this does not happen again. The company had an assembly line and the product came out directly without any human intervention. The fan would be assembled and slowly, it would come to a line where it is filled with the box and then packed and come out for shipping. As there was no intervention, there was no checking. Many people suggested different techniques like manual intervention in final stages, weight balance to check weight, etc. One trainee sitting in that meeting room said meekly, why don't we put a powerful fan alongside assembly line. If the box is empty, it will simply blow away under the powerful wind. It clicked. The trainee was quite creative, innovative. 

You too can be. You just have to believe that some big things can also be done in a cheaper and simpler way. For that you need to wear thinking hats. You need to see the problem from different perspective. If you have a cross-functional team, it would be better. You can also start to take the problem step by step. Often you would clear everything until you find the real problem - the real bottleneck, which created problem. Whatever you or your team thinks, write it down to think about it on other day. Think about different ways that the problem can be solved. Einstein build the bulb after failing for 10000 nos. of time. He tried that many times so he succeeded. Why to stop thinking & trying. You should also share your problem with people from different background. May be they have some idea about it. Don't ignore any idea because it had been stopped a few years back. The situations then & now might be different. Always check the impact of the things. Take action if the impact of the things are big. There might be no point in working on 0.0001 % of the problem and keeping the project completion at bay. First launch the project and see.