How to teach the brain to produce fresh ideas?

What are the ways to generate business ideas? This is a very difficult question that concerns many people. It is scientifically proven that the brain retains the ability to change from birth to death. What is more, the discovery of something new stimulates neural centers that are responsible for pleasure.

Creative ideas are not taken from the air. Our experience and information coming to our brain is responsible for their formation. It will be much easier to give a brilliant idea if the exact sentence is given. It is important to remember - the more accurate the task is, the better the response of the brain to it is. So what are the ways to generate possible great ideas for business?

One of the effective methods is the Synectics, which allows you to generate ideas based on associations. As an example of such a technique, we have Edward De Bono’s exercises on creating associations between seemingly different themes and concepts.

Randomly choose 4 words. Then come up with a random criterion according to which one of the words would be crossed out.

For example:

Window, dog, cotton, chair.

Criterion 1: all inanimate objects except the dog.

Criterion 2: in the first three words there is a letter “o”, and in the rest there is not.

And so on. Other exercises develop associations quite well too. For example, you can choose two words and link them so that they represent an idea or a slogan for a new startup. Then randomly add a third word to them. And think about how a third word can serve business development. Then think about which word will help make a startup more environment friendly, more technological, interesting, modern, and so on.

Randomly choose four words. With their use, create a creative newspaper headline. And then make a brief description of the article under it.

The goal of such tasks is to stop thinking in patterns. This technique creates a creative charge that will allow you to look at a problem or task from a different angle.

Another technique aimed at improving creative thinking.

Take a piece of paper and write down on it the names of 10 people whom you consider to be the closest. L - Leila, N — Natali, and so on.

Then write down five words on the first letter of the name of each person. For example: L - love, lime, leaf. N – nothing, never, note. Combine the written words with each other, inventing new associations. For example, love + note = love note and so on.

Yes, at first glance, such exercises do not make sense. But that is the way it should be, because their main goal is to temporarily turn off logical thinking and come to conceptual thinking in order to open their brain for fresh creative ideas.