Book of the Week: inGenius

02 Aug 2015

This week, I read inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, because I wanted to read another book by Tina Seelig, but this one was available. I found the book fairly thin on new content, but full of stories. Stories that I have heard before and some new ones. If you already know of Tina’s creativity class at Stanford, you could probably skip this book. Innovation Engine The inside of the engine

• Your knowledge provides fuel for your imagination
• Your imagination is the catalyst for the transformation of knowledge into new ideas.
• Your attitude is a spark that sets the Innovation Engine in motion.

The outside of the engine

• Resources are all assets in your community.
• Habitats are your local environments, including your home, school, or office.
• Culture is the collective beliefs, values, and behaviors in your community.

The Innovation Engine is the framework that Tina uses to talk about creativity. You can’t write a book without putting concepts in relation to a framework.

• Knowledge
  • reframing problems
  • connecting and combing ideas
  • generating multiple ideas through brainstorming
• Habitat
  • physical spaces
  • constraints
  • incentives
  • team dynamics
• Attitude
  • experimentation and failure
  • big challenges

Spaces Ewan McIntosh describes 7 different type of spaces. I found make space useful in thinking about how to build creative spaces.

1. private space - place to be by ourselves
2. group spaces - small teams working together
3. publshing spaces - showcase what’s going on
4. peformign spaces - share your ideas or act them out
5. participiation spaces - personally engage with what’s going on
6. data - library or database
7. watchign spaces - passively observe what’s happening around us.

Six Thinking Hats Edward de Bono describes six different roles people play on teams

• white hat - drawn to facts, logical
• green hat - comfortable generating new ideas
• red hat - uses intuition to make decisions
• blue hat - organized and process-oriented
• black hat - devil’s advocate
• yellow hat - eager to make everyone happy

Errors Tina mentioned that Facebook has a two-pizza policy, but she probably meant Amazon. Jeff Bezos has a two pizza rule on number of meeting attendees. People tend to misremember things. I also found repeated numbers in the footnote. I think that’s a bit sloppy. Since I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m immersed in the same culture, the same language, the same stores, the same anecdotes, the same knowledge. If everybody thinks the same way and knows the same things in Silicon Valley, wouldn’t it be more creative to think outside of Silicon Valley?