Fostering Creativity

According to Wikipedia creativity is “a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or problem solutions, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts”. Creativity towards innovation in product development settings are often used interchangeably. Innovation and creative product development refer to completely new as well as significantly improved products, processes or methods. Creativity techniques have been developed by both academia and industry to shift a person's mental state into one that fosters creativity. Michalko (2006) in his book presents the various creativity techniques that have been proposed in the Oslo Manual which is the foremost international source of guidelines for the collection and use of data on innovation activities in industry (OECD, 2005). Several other web resources contain guidelines and examples of creativity techniques (e.g