Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity To Inspire Change

What is creative thinking really all about? How do we discover promising new ways of making, imagining, and adeptly moving towards our creative goals, whether working on our own or together with others?Innovating Minds offers a perspective grounded in science to help us realize our individual and collective creativity. The book presents a five-part "thinking framework" in which ideas are continually formed and re-formed within the dynamic interplay of our minds, brains, and environments. Ideas exist in our minds, but they are steeped in emotion, motivation, perception, and action--and they rely on support from our environments, in all their social, physical, and symbolic complexities. Drawing on research from studies on individuals participating in small groups, multinational organizations, and brain networks, Innovating Minds illuminates the real-world challenges facing creative professionals from all walks of life--from dancers to designers, artists, architects, scientists, software developers, and others. The thinking framework raises five essential questions: 1. What ideas are competing for your attention and awareness, and how are you helping to form and re-form them? 2. Are you aptly zooming in and zooming out? 3. Do you allow for both spontaneity and deliberateness in your thinking? 4. Are you thinking using the full power of concepts, together with sensing, feeling, and well-chosen action goals? 5. How do you ask your environments and your "thinking tools" to creatively partner with you? Throughout, Innovating Minds invites readers to explore and put to use lessons from the thinking framework with exercises, thinking prompts, and activities called creativity cross-checks and queries. Built on a broad platform of brain, behavioral, and organizational sciences, the integrative thinking framework provides new and enduring resources for becoming more innovative thinkers and doers.

• | Author: Wilma Koutstaal, Jonathan T. Binks
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 01, 2015
• | Number of Pages: 360 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0199316023
• | ISBN-13: 9780199316021