Visnes, Rogaland (Norway)

Psychology, Education & Business

– Are you talking about cognitive processes or business?
– Both!
– What do you mean?
– What´s inside their minds when they try to innovate?
– How many years have you been abroad?
– Twelve days! (but in Visnes…)
– Do you want to talk about inventions? I wasn´t looking to that direction…
– Yes, because we should look where nobody is looking to see what others aren´t seeing! – Right?
– Are you talking about education or economical growth?
– I´m talking about unlocking creative potential in people´s minds!
– Do you mean regard this process as other cognitive processes?
– I mean, how would be if we train, develop and improve the mindset and skills behind innovation from a very early age at schools or … later on in life.
– How do you pretend link “all this” with number cognition and planning skills?

– We have proved, and we actually have evidence that number cognition is linked with the executive brain, which involves higher order tasks such as reasoning and decision making… We send information from the frontal lobes to the back of the brain all time, involving “higher-and-lower-level-processing” and so through this interaction, we represent the world and we transform things in something new; imagination.

Companies are like brains!

“Aha”… the Eureka Moment!

We need more “Aha-things”!

I imagine creativity as a blast of something in our brains. The sudden reorganization of knowledge, ideas, situations, intuitions in our brains; It relies on brain structural and functional correlates, so when we create, we change how our brain works; it´s something that I find thrilling; we usually talk about how shape our bodies, but what about our minds? A mind which is challenged by new experiences and learning can´t come back to its previous nature. – But, could we train a sexy mind for productive and innovative businesses?

It´s not only about brain power. In a matter of “energy”, nothing is more powerful that a “teen-brain”, however sometimes we don´t have skills or the right methods/tools to canalize all this energy in something productive, we are more like “headless chicken” with hyperactive minds. And then, we grow up, and we become “young professionals” with an entrepreneurial spirit but trapped in an old economic model that is overdue.

At this point, everything has to be written and created again, and it happens in every field of research, science, environment, health, education and even in our lives; our personal development “project” must be held in a very limited time, with limited resources, and we must invest literally everything.

But, nobody talks about how difficult is nowadays to build «own success» from a worn pattern! (Anyways, let´s define success).

How to bring a project to life?

– Being creative, is enough? It depends on the purpose.

I used to work with people with special needs conditions, and I learned a lot from them, about life and about encouragement. One time, I met a youngster (22 years old guy) who was struggling with schizophrenia outbreaks; he was very good in physics, math and he had an extraordinary ability in robotics and in “creating things”. He developed a project to help Africa in water supply in small villages and health resources. He put so many hours and effort there, that he forgot his own disorder; because to help the others was more relevant. I couldn´t help him to control the “creating process” because there were many ideas, stakeholders, resources, goals… radical innovations which involve finding an entirely way to do things. The creating process never ended and turned up in something impossible; he did not bring a project to life but we got the previous purpose, which is not relevant here.

But coming back to organizations, we can´t afford this, because we want to develop a project. – Right? Maybe here´s the difference between creativity, invention and innovation; creativity as the ability to do unusual things, the invention as the ability to create something new with “a unique insight” and innovation defined as the implementation of something new.

It´s not only a matter of “brain power”, but planning, assessment, action, leadership, strategic/critical thinking, logic, empathy, human capital, design-thinking, influence and persuasion management, the ability to observe, lateral thinking, knowledge and experience, perception, reasoning biases and much more. [Complex, but at least we know the ingredients, we only need to find out the best recipe – practice]. 

Education & Innovation

The idea is to unlock creative potential and train, develop and improve skills behind innovation!

Business success in the 21st century is linked to innovation. I believe that creativity is a process that we can develop and train; within the creation/design of immersive learning experiences, we could help people to take creative risks – both personally and professionally.

Are we investing enough resources to promote innovation in our countries?
Are schools providing these immersive learning experiences?
Are we helping kids in “being creative and future creators”?
Do we know enough tools for innovation?
What do we know about productive innovation teams and effective individuals?

Thanks to  all the «sexy minds» I found in Norway and all the inputs for my research project!!!

Thanks for reading 🙂

Lorena