Are You More Innovative Than You Think?

Research from Brian J. Lucas and Loran Nordgren published in the Harvard Business Review shows that many people underestimate their creative abilities when working on creative tasks. While people often think they'll generate around 10 new ideas if they persist in a task for another 10 minutes, they can actually generate 15. Furthermore, persistent key factors, including motivation, hope, and anxiety all play important roles in innovation. People are more motivated to generate new ideas when they have a stake in the outcome, hope is needed for creative work and innovation creates anxiety. The trick to great innovation is constructing pre-inventive structures that have properties such as novelty, ambiguity, and divergence.