I was the guest on Wise Talk, a long-running teleconference series hosted by Sue Bethanis, the CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership. It was a fun conversation and quite enjoyable to answer questions from the Wise Talk listening audience too.
You can click here to listen to Wise Talk episode 99 on Strategy and Creative Thinking.
We explored, among multiple topics, borrowing creative ideas, structures, and strategic approaches from other areas and applying them to what you do. We talked primarily about the What’s It Like exercise we use, and Sue asked about what else we do to help people get comfortable with borrowing ideas, especially when that involves looking at analogous situations to their own.
Since any great question deserves a blog response, Sue’s question was an opportunity to bring together creative thinking exercises filled with more than 50 ideas on borrowing creative ideas – in ethical, productive, and beneficial ways.
Creative Thinking Exercises for Borrowing Creative Ideas
New, Innovative Ideas – Strategy Planning with What’s It Like – The What’s It Like creative thinking exercise is a go-to one to mine analogous strategic models for new creative ideas.
25 Ways to Change Your Character – Change Your Character is a creative thinking exercise to help you borrow ideas from a whole variety of people with different perspectives than you have while dealing with comparable situations.
Readin’ Where They Ain’t - Another way to stay on top of borrowing ideas is to immerse yourself in situations dissimilar to your own while looking for strategic connections.
Steal this Idea! - I stole this creative thinking exercise (no surprise I guess), and it’s a great way to involve an entire team in actively looking for and borrowing creative ideas.
Borrowing Creative Inspiration – 6 Areas to Boost Creative Thinking - It’s beneficial to borrow familiar structures that lend themselves to creative thinking. You can then generate new creative ideas by running your own perspective through these structures.
Borrowing Ideas and Adapting Them
7 Ways to Borrow Creative Ideas with a Clear Conscience - In answer to a question from an audience member about how you ethically borrow creative ideas, this post highlights how to turn inspiration from others into your own ideas.
1 Great Way to Be More Creative Each Day - We borrowed the Trait Transformation creative thinking exercise from Chuck Dymer a long time ago, and repackage it here as a way to easily transform others’ ideas in dramatically different ways to best suit your needs.
Be More Derivative, Creative, and Fun – Katy Perry showed up at an awards show with a completely derivative dress heralded as something new. We turned Katy Perry and her dress into a creative thinking exercise that lets you make the same derivative-to-creative switcheroo.
Reinterpreting Creative Inspiration – 7 Lessons to Borrow Creative Ideas – A performer channeling Judy Garland onstage shared ideas for how she reinterpreted a very well-known person to make her portrayal familiar yet distinct to her performance style.
Making It Clear When Someone Borrows Your Creative Idea
Ideaprints – 9 Signals Your Brain Was All Over a Creative Idea – It can be fun when someone else borrows YOUR creativity and tries to make it THEIR own. Just in case, you can put your ideaprints on your creative ideas to make it more difficult for someone to borrow from you and claim your ideas as their own. – Mike Brown
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