Everyone who has a job related to creativity knows something; finding the best ideas, getting the necessary inspiration and being in the right circles are now the source of inventing innovation.
In a world of work driven by ideas of constant innovation, originality and progress, whether you are an entrepreneur, a professional with many years of experience or even an artist; finding the best ideas is as important as bringing them to life.
Sometimes those ideas seem like they will never come to you, but you have to start somewhere and set off. When you think of the road you want to take as a multi-lane highway passing through big cities, finding suitable environments to have ideas and understanding the methods of developing ideas will be the short and safe way to take innovative steps for both yourself and the progress of the corporate structure you work with.
Why do we come up with new ideas?
A good idea is usually found while observing people and their needs. The basis of this is recognizing the difficulty people face in anything they do and wanting to find a solution for it.
By the way, the group of people I am talking about here includes you in all aspects of your life. The solutions you find while trying to solve some dead ends you encounter at home, on the road or at work are also a type of idea you manage to implement. These are temporary, permanent, sustainable or not; decide that later. But the summary and the important part is this; trying until you succeed.
Sometimes people may not realize that they need something and when they come across a solution, they realize that they really need it.
The simplest and most effective way to find a good idea is to focus on daily life and seek solutions to the difficulties people face in daily life. Using your imagination while doing this is the basis of innovation. While logic takes you from A to B, the world of imagination can take you everywhere without depending on this.
Where do you find inspiration?
When you come into an environment that you are not in every day, when you go to another part of the city or sit down to take a breather, when you drive to another city and pass through a town, there is something I want you to realize; there you think differently than in the places you visit in your daily routine and think about different things than you think every day. When you step out of your daily routine, in a different environment or during a completely different experience.
To simplify this a bit, getting out of your comfort zone, attending a networking meeting to meet new people, getting out and walking around the city or the coast to get some fresh air, examining the historical and architecturally important structures in the city, or even being alone and closing your eyes and maybe listening to your favorite song by your favorite singer a few times in a row can be useful suggestions.
What environment do creativity and innovation thrive?
Special places where a person feels good provide suitable environments for ideas to emerge.
Literature and music have been timeless sources of inspiration throughout history, and the places that writers enjoy being in have been places they frequently visit to find inspiration.
When traveling to a city you love very much, you may find the inspiration you are looking for on a bus or plane, at the airport, in an authentic café, on a hill overlooking the sea, in the autumn wind coming through the open window of an old mosque overlooking the hustle and bustle in the bazaar, or even, like me, in the hot navel stone and marble basin of a steamy bathhouse, or you may come up with an idea.
The lead actress of the Netflix series Emily In Paris mostly finds marketing ideas by getting inspiration from Paris, where she lives, and the friendships she makes there. While writing my newly finished book, I occasionally visited and spent time in the cities and places where the story takes place, waiting for something related to the story to pour out of my mind. When I want to do something new with work or develop on a visual design, it is good to spend a few hours in one of the cafes overlooking the sea on the coast of the city.
These are suggestions that are a bit smaller in scale and can reveal and support individual creativity. The real environments that will allow the emerging ideas to take root and grow strongly are universities and research centers, institutions that cooperate with industry and developed countries that offer a high quality of life and where intellectual property is strongly protected by law.
For example, Switzerland is one of the best in the world in terms of strong university-industry cooperation and intellectual property rights in the current era. America, on the other hand, is at the forefront with its R&D expenditures and technology companies that affect us all globally.
Europe is also here of course; cities such as Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin and London, where creativity and entrepreneurship are supported, where startups, grants and support are densely clustered to attract new ideas and the final products that will emerge from these ideas to their own countries, are among the most innovative cities where people come together to share their ideas, grow and elevate them; therefore, they have high cultural and social impact.
These cities and the countries where they are located attract creative people with good ideas and offer them a free living space. In return, innovation turns into economic value. Networking events, daily brainstorming sessions, and qualified professional meetings are useful places to meet new approaches.
Active listening and developing dialogue when appropriate will help you open the closed boxes in your own mind and remove the isolation on your ideas.
The three most important things that support creativity and innovation:
- The courage to try
- Being passionate
- Being open to other people’s ideas
The starting point of the idea that came to life
If you are looking for new ideas, wanting to be creative or interested in innovation, you need to get up from where you are right now, find a place where you feel good and organize the things that are going on in your head there. But before that, there is something very important that you need to have: Being determined to achieve a result.
While focusing and channeling your thoughts, you need to find places where people with different levels of experience from different education and work disciplines come together.
Is everything in your head still blurry and behind a curtain of fog?
Regularly spending time in nature, in the city or in places that are good for you, reading books, listening to music, following podcasts and having significant interactions with as many people as possible will help to clear the fog and see what is inside your head more clearly.
