As a leader, it’s important to embrace creativity within your company — constantly innovating, evolving with your industry and ensuring that your business is set up for long-term success. Ask your team to help develop those ideas. Redefine problems, force connections in areas outside of your comfort zone, and continually practice the Creative Problem Solving process.

Those creative ideas will spark your company’s innovation. As Martin Zwilling wrote in an article for Inc. Magazine, there are 10 basic rules that I outlined in my book Why Didn’t I Think of That to increase the quality of creativity within your business.

1. Record new ideas immediately or you will lose many
2. Openly ask for new ideas from your team and others
3. Redefine every problem from multiple perspectives
4. Look for problem connections to other disciplines
5. Develop habits that increase creativity
6. Separate imaginative thinking from judgmental thinking
7. Evaluate ideas for pluses, potential, and concerns (PPC)
8. To solve a problem, set a target of at least 40 ideas
9. Accept that creativity, like any skill, requires practice
10. Strive to see new problems as new opportunities

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