In the past I have written extensively about the power of innovation and how it has changed the world around us. Of course, innovation's transformative powers are apparent if you look at the way our world works, starting from how smart phones used in almost every corner of the world have revolutionized our understanding of communication, to robots serving food in restaurants from India to Japan. Scientific innovation has pushed the frontiers of our understanding of what is possible. A question that is often asked is: how can we harness innovation and what precisely drives it? It is an answer that many seek to find, beginning with individuals who'd like to be the world's next innovators to corporations who want to continue having a competitive advantage.
Walt Disney once said "If you can imagine it, you can create it." As a scientist, I believe that innovation lies in the human imagination, because you once you can conceptualize something in your imagination, only then you are able to bring it to life. Of course, it must happen in accordance to the scientific rules and laws that govern the universe, but creativity lies in being able to connect those rules in order to bring an idea to life. However, if this spark of an idea initially does not exist in your mind, in your thoughts, in your imagination then it cannot be brought to life because you are not aware of it. Precisely because of this, creativity is an important facet in all areas of life because it allows us to create something from our minds, which separates a human mind from a machine. In itself, creativity requires a certain fluidity of thinking, because by definition, a creative mind is one that is able to think in a flexible way and imagine different possibilities.
Creativity can be linked with open-mindedness. Open-mindedness is a cornerstone of Western philosophy, which was laid out by Socrates and the Socratic method. This a well known method of inquiry which aims to eliminate subjective bias and get at the truth by debating different opinions and objectively looking at the evidence provided to uphold those different viewpoints. Famously quoted, Socrates states "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing." It is through this thought that his philosophy is born. Thus, open-mindedness is the quality that allows an individual to entrain various ideas, even ones that are contradictory to one's initial belief, and deliberate them thereby arriving to the truth and the core of the matter through questioning. It is in this way that open mindedness and innovation are linked -- because in order to entertain different and, sometimes contradicting viewpoints, those views either have to be presented or conjured up in the mind as counter examples. Thus, it is through creativity that innovation and open-mindedness go hand in hand.
A scientific study which examined what makes people more open minded found that open-minded people are open to all sources and types of information. More over, open minded is defined by a deliberative mind. The authors found that individuals in the deliberative mindset group "more easily accessed memory traces of information incidental to the ongoing to task." This means that although they were deliberating information, they were focused on how it pertains to the task in hand. Moreover, an interesting finding is that this process occurs on a pre-conscious level, rather the conscious level. Thus, changing your thinking patter has an effect on the subconscious level and it changes the way you process information. The study also found that open-mindedness not only enhances working memory but people who displayed a deliberative mindset were better at focusing on selecting information that is pertinent to one's goals or task at hand. In linking both of these together, the results of the study shows that although it may seem to be contrary, open-mindedness leads to greater focus, as well as the ability to make connections between the presented information and the goal.
Thus, the key to innovation is developing our open-mindedness. Being more open minded means being more open to different ideas, cultures, points of views, modes of expression and styles, and most importantly realizing that our view point may not always be right. It is allowing ourselves to be wrong, to debate our view point, while connecting the insights we receive from various sources of information to get at the true core of the issue. In essence, it is consuming a lot of information and then creatively connecting this information to solve the problem at hand. Or, as Steve Jobs put it, "connecting the dots."
