Creative Tools for Innovation

Having run more than 70 innovation-focused workshops, Tomislav Buljubasic, author of 7innovation, has a strong understanding of what it takes for individuals and teams to realize their full potential. Having even created an app to help individuals be more creative, he's committed to making the world a more innovative place.

Six questions with Tomislav:

1. What is your overall mission? What are you trying to achieve?

Creating innovation culture and try to inspire (unleash) innovation, let’s say that this could be described as the front end of innovation process. I tried to add most of my methodology to free iPhone App “Unleash Your Creativity” which should help in unleashing the creative potential of individual. It’s always important to say that creativity can be thought or at least everyone can be inspired in order to be more creative. It is interesting to see how future entrepreneurs or students react to creativity tools.

2. How do you define innovation?

The simplest definition for innovation is ‘ideas that bring profit’ or in the case of non-commercial ideas, ‘when it raises interest’. Ideas becomes innovation only when they reach the market, then the market will determine its fate. It is always crucial to correctly define the prospect of innovation in early stage of the process, and that’s the difficult part.

3. How do you motivate yourself or others to generate good ideas or creative input?

Describing current top projects, trends and most important innovations from the past is always a good way to motivate others. The 7innovation method is a tool to make innovation process simpler, more efficient and more successful. It makes the innovation process fast and responsive to short-term goals. What makes this method unique is its iterative access, with deep scan of organization’s capabilities including internal innovators.

4. How do you create an innovative culture?

Innovation culture is the main achievement for every organization to be successful in innovation. Without the support from the top it is impossible to achieve. It is a continuous process done with reaching every colleague using many innovation activities like workshops or awareness presentations. Innovation should be the responsibility of everyone in the organization with a clear and transparent innovation process which supports ideation and idea realization. It is interesting to see how people like software developers react to innovation culture change. Every innovation approach needs to be prepared with clearly a defined focused topic, otherwise they will go too wide or dig into unnecessary details.

5. How do you continue and strive to be a leader in the field of innovation and creativity?

There is a lot of information to process each day, and the biggest help for it is surely Twitter. I’m trying to follow latest blogs and books in this topic as the innovation management is changing and developing. Many methods which were popular ten years ago are now abandoned or deeply changed. One of essential resources used frequently is also Trendhunter.com.

6. What emerging innovations or trends do you predict will have a big impact on the future?
Well, robots are coming. Many of today’s jobs will vanish because machines will take over the work. Next thing is surely Gamification as it will become widely popular – also in what I’m doing. 3D printing will make prototyping easier and make the innovation process faster.