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Creativity is a process of developing and expressing novel ideas that are likely to be useful.

Or

Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others.

Therefore creativity is a process that anyone can improve on. Defining that process and improving on it is what we need to do to increase our creativity. Moreover, the purpose or goal of the creative process is the solving of a particular problem or the satisfying of a specific need, so if we keep this in mind, our process will have better results.

In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Creativity involves convergent as well as divergent thinking. The creative process begins with divergent thinking—a breaking away from familiar or established ways of seeing and doing that produces novel ideas. Convergent thinking occurs in the later stages of the process. As the original ideas generated by the divergent thinking are communicated to others, they are evaluated to determine which ideas are genuinely novel and worth pursuing.

Again, creativity is a process you employ to improve your problem solving. So you’re not done until your creative efforts have produced a product, service, or process that answers the original need or solves the problem you identified at the outset.

Creativity is a widely misunderstood subject. Do you have any of the following misconceptions about creativity? Doing away with them will improve your creative potential

Misconception #1: Intelligent people are more creative. This is wrong as intelligence correlates with creativity only up to a point. Once you have enough intelligence to do your job, the relationship no longer holds.

Misconception #2: Young people are more creative than the old. In the business world, the necessary creativity can be found in an adult of any age. At the same time, however, expertise can at times inhibit creativity: experts sometimes find it difficult to see or think outside established patterns.

Misconception #3: Creativity is reserved for the few—the flamboyant, high rollers. The willingness to take calculated risks and the ability to think in untraditional ways do play a role in creativity. But that doesn’t mean you have to be on the wild side, or take the midnight jet to Vegas for a quick 24 hours in order to be creative. It doesn’t mean that you have to be markedly different from everyone else.

Contrary to popular conception, writes Peter Drucker, most innovators "in real life are unromantic figures, and much more likely to spend hours on a cash-flow projection than to dash off looking for 'risks.'" On rare occasions, those innovations will be visionary leaps forward that revolutionize an industry. But more often they will be small improvements that advance the organizational cause.

Misconception #4: The creative act is something you do alone. Actually many of the world’s most important inventions resulted not from the work of one lone genius, but from the a group of people working together.

So to improve our Creativity there are a few areas we can work on. Number one is curiosity. Don’t hold back. Ask questions, wonder why, look outside the box and the everyday things you see all the time – not only in your work, but in other things around you.

Challenge yourself, and others to do things differently and that will make you see things differently. Take a different way to work. Eat at new restaurants. Talk to new people. Talk about things you don’t know anything about.

Don’t be satisfied with the way things are. Shake things up! Don’t settle. Provide a little constructive criticism, or even constructive discontent. Open the door to new ideas.

And finally look for opportunity. The silver lining in the cloud is only found by examining the cloud in detail, not simply accepting it as a rainy day. Look for ways to do better, faster, smarter, and ask others to help you find better ways.

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