Innovative thinking is the ability to create something new, moving away from traditional thought patterns. With the help of innovative thinking, one can generate new ideas, act differently, and come up with novel solutions to problems.

The definition of innovative thinking

There are different types of thinking. In terms of novelty and originality, there is innovative (creative) and reproductive (standard) thinking. No one uses only standard thinking; we all have the ability to think innovatively.

What is innovative thinking? Innovation includes the ability to think outside the box to achieve goals, or come up with novel solutions to difficult situations using the environment, objects, or circumstances in an unusual way.

Innovative thinking comes down to the ability to take what already exists and use it in a new way.

We do not need to approach everything outside the box all the time. When we come up with something new, our brain uses a lot of energy. It’s like taking a trip on an unfamiliar road, which may have pits and other obstacles, versus using the smooth, familiar path.

So we use standard thinking most of the time and innovative thinking out of necessity. This helps us save brain resources by doing many things automatically.

It’s commonly believed that only the right hemisphere is responsible for creativity, but this is not so. Innovative thinking involves many parts of the brain, not just one.

When we come up with something new, initially we turn to the left hemisphere to use what we already know — words, numbers, lists, and data. Then we connect the right hemisphere to come up with something new based on the information we know.

Everything we experience throughout our life contributes to our ability to be creative.

All children are creative from three to five years old. They do not yet know the standard ways to use some items, so they have the ability to make unusual connections. After that, one’s level of innovative thinking depends on their personal experiences: whether they played games, trained skills, learned how things work, read books, or watched movies.

It matters whether innovative thinking was encouraged at school or university. If it wasn’t, one might be afraid to try something new in the future. As an employee, one might ask their manager to assign them tasks that don’t require creativity.

Innovative thinking examples

Innovative employees are highly valued, but it’s also important to be able to implement one’s creative ideas. At the same time, non-standard solutions should be focused on specific business goals.

Here are some innovative thinking examples from famous companies.

One well-known example of an innovative solution in the IT field is Facebook’s data center network. Employees fully rebuilt the Facebook network infrastructure. The data center has become a high-speed, scalable network on which separate clusters of various sizes can be built. As a result, the need for some equipment to store data in the cloud services has been reduced.

There is a Japanese business philosophy called Kaizen which seeks continuous improvement of production and business processes. This method has been successfully used at Toyota. Any employee can present an idea to improve the production process, and it will be implemented. The popular Scrum methodology is based on the principles of Kaizen.

Even if a business process is solid, it can always be improved upon. If a tester spends 15 minutes running a test, one might come up with a way to make the test run in 15 seconds. As a result, the employee will be able to spend more time learning something new instead.

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