Creativity - TEDTalks with Practitioner Insights
Read Time: 2 Minutes
The Power of Imagination
Designing products and services involves deeply understanding consumers’ beliefs, attitudes, and inner selves as product managers; the journey to a fine and competitive product is a function of user insights, competitiveness, value-added, differentiation, and effective execution.
Unlike artificial intelligence and other technology, people possess a faculty computers can’t match: the power to imagine and act on new possibilities. Our unique ability is imagination.
Meet the imagination worker: those who think creatively to envision a different future and work to make that vision a reality. The following TED talks challenge our curious minds to understand the most profound feelings and emotions embedded in the consumption experience.
The First Secret of Design is … Noticing by Tony Fadell
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Practitioner insight:
- As human beings, we get used to the way things are swiftly. You miss the details and nuances of what we have in front of us. This is referred to as “habituation.”
- Imagination breaks habituation by confronting assumptions, mental frames, and individual mindsets. It requires a beginner’s thinking.
- Identify the invisible problems by looking broader to simplify the process, looking closer to the details, and thinking younger (young minds) by asking the right questions.
Watch Time: 17 minutes
Imagination: It’s Not What You Think. It’s How You Think by Charles Faulkner
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Practitioner insight:
- Imagination is not what we think; it is how we feel. A culture of imagination builds on previous knowledge, which can be questioned to create new knowledge. Imagination leads our thinking but complements our knowledge.
- We see the world according to the instruments, perceptions, and understanding developed and stored in our brains. Our imagination will use what we know as a central element (law of similarity), and then we will expand to include other elements as part of our thoughts. Imagination is between perceptions and understanding. This is how we make sense of the world.
- Imagination flourishes in the presence of “uncertainty.” How we reason and rationalize this uncertainty drives or restrains our imagination. Words evoke experiences, not realities, i.e., a story.
Watch Time: 18 minutes
A Powerful Way to Unleash Your Natural Creativity by Tim Harford
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Practitioner insight:
- Tim encourages the use of the “slow-motion multitask” approach to the execution of multiple projects. He also found that switching between topics or issues creates multiple moods that spark imagination.
- The secret of creativity is multitasking and moving projects from their original setting to a new one, from one box into another.
- Learning to do something well can often help you do something else. Creative people have serious and defined hobbies.
- Should we cross-train the minds of our employees? A product design team requires this approach.
Watch Time: 18 minutes
About the Author
Carlos M Rodriguez is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Quantitative Methods and Director of the Center for the Study of Innovation Management, CSIM, in the College of Business, Delaware State University, USA. He is the KHUB’s Product Design and Development Tools section curator and a collaborator to the Product Development Management Association, PDMA. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business-to-Business Marketing, European Journal of Innovation Management, Journal of Brand Strategy, Journal of International Marketing, International Marketing Review, Management Decision, Journal of Business and Leadership, Journal of Higher Education Research & Development, Journal of Marketing and Consumer Research among others. Currently, he serves on the editorial board of several journals. His research interests are relationship marketing, branding and customer experiences, product design and innovation, and new product development teams. He recently published the book Product Design and Innovation: Analytics for Decision Making, which is centered on the design techniques and methodologies vital to the product design process. He is engaged in several international educational, research, and academic projects and international professional consulting activities.
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