INVENT YOUR BRAIN ON INNOVATION

Penned by Miftaudeen Jmaiu O.
Edited by Yusuff Ademola A.

Part 1

Invent your brain on innovation actually refers to the using of our brain on what others could not do, think about what can risk your dignity, think outside the box when people think is abnormal. Think about innovative ideas that people will beg for it in the future for investment. Make lots of experiments, mistake and have funs.  Think about what can save you from a recessive life to inflated ones. This reminds me of a quote by Mary Lou Cook which states that:

 “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having funs.”

Sometimes, easy means difficulty. Have you ever been assigned an easy task which, for you is actually difficult to perform and may be nobody else? And that is when you experience frustration.  I have experienced that when I was learning how to read Quran, it is really difficult because I was taught to breath in some ways which I have never done in my life – of course, that is the secret of a good Quran reader. It is similar to what happens when a boss comes to a meeting and tells you to think innovatively. Come on give me your creative and innovative ideas...think out of the box. I want to hear that... I need innovation. Easy, simple, but actually hard to do .You need to practice .You need to know how to get out of the box, where to go, and how to come back inside the box because that is where we live. We actually live inside the box. So I want to ask these questions as I asked myself. This presentation is a little journey answer; I hope that some of it will resonate with yours.

The first thing is to ask is “WHY”. Why should we think innovatively, WHY should we invent our brain on innovation? But we feel safe inside the box! We agree with everybody else. And when we go out, we risk our reputation. We work so hard for a lifetime to build it up, why should we risk it? Is it something which is a luxury, that only few people can do, or is it really a necessity?  Why? We are really part of a network. We are nodes in a network. We share information in a real time. And at the end, we all possess the same information. That is the end of it and that is a scary thought. If we all possess that same information, what makes a difference between us? Where does our dignity in human beings lie? It really depends on what we generate with that common shared information. It is to think creatively or innovatively, to go out of the box, is not a luxury. It is a necessity for us and for our dignity as human beings.

So WHICH INNOVATION are we talking about? We must have a clear definition, so that we are really talking about something specific. It is not our mind, we cannot think out of our minds. It is a boundary within our minds. The boundary between what we know, and what we have not still or yet thought about. What is our mind? What is our knowledge structure? It is an emergence out of the complex mechanism, which is the BRAIN. We start with initial conditions, our genetic heritage. We have boundary conditions, THE ENVIRONMENT. We have indirect experience, years and years in school and university to learn what other people have thought, what other people have discovered what other people have created. Then we have our own direct experience, our success, and our failures that really make what we are. All of this builds the anthills which we live very well in. And whatever we think inside that anthill, that box, we feel safe.  Whatever is outside, it is invisible to us. We do not know what is outside the box. That is why it is so risky, because nobody else knows. And so we are faced with something which is necessary to our dignity, but actually it difficult to do.

HOW do we bring innovation in? How do we do that? What are the mechanisms? Do we need an apple to fall on our heads, or are there some specific techniques?  Well, reality is out there for us to perceive it. It is beautiful, you see the flowers. We have a lot of ideas which is our convergent information, the dominant ideas. Whenever we need to think about an area, a focused area, we have ideas on how things should be. We have requirements, we have specifications. We know how things are, because that the way they always have been. But if we want to go out of the box, we need to add something more little spice, something which goes the convergent information. Something wrong; absurd which apparently not significant – something which take us far. This is what we call divergent information. We need a little bit of that divergent information to cross the border within our minds (to think extensively), from what we know to what we have not yet thought about. This is the essential mechanism that is necessary, and it takes us to a place where we do not really know where to go. We are suspended. It is like the middle game in chess. Where do you go once you are out the box? You have no present direction. It is a really a potential situation that brings us to a feeling that we should immediately go back (that stop us thinking innovatively). This does not make any sense. Let us go back to safe place. Let us go back inside the box. That is a temptation we need to resist, we need to value long thinking. Normally we talk about brilliant, fast and deep thinking but here we are talking about something different, long thinking. What does that mean? It is some thoughts that take us far. It is as if you are reading a poem, you do not judge the writer notes. It is the ensembles that give you a feeling and take you far. We must do the same thing with our concepts. We need to go far which we can use association of ideas, compilation of ideas, and extraction of principles and application of those principles to area where they were never applied before. We need to be open minded, fluent, look for alternatives and not for the correct answers. Because when you think creatively or innovatively, there is no single correct answer. Suppose now that we are lucky, we land upon a new idea in our travel of innovation and creativity. What is the value of that?

What is the value of the new idea? How do we assess the value of a new idea? It is very difficult if it is really new, because you have never seen that before. It is as if you land on a new planet, totally undiscovered territory. It is difficult to value the new idea because we do not feel entitled to be inventors. Click the below link for part 2:
http://themindbuilders.blogspot.com.ng/2017/01/invent-your-brain-on-innovation_19.html