Innovate Like a Movie Director

Why not get creative on an epic scale?

I love films. I just love that cinematic experience. It’s the best experience you can have in a darkened room when someone has spent $200 million on two hours of entertainment. I often truly can’t believe how creative and brilliant some minds are. Do you remember the last movie you saw and walked away from, lost for words to describe it? The last time I had a wide-eyed and excited feeling after a movie was from watching the British director Christopher Nolan’s 2010 epic, Inception.

If you haven't yet seen it, I would strongly suggest that you consider making it an addition to your collection. The science fiction story is about a group of spies getting inside dreams to capture secrets. Doesn’t sound like the making of a classic plot, and it's perhaps not a movie for those, like my ever-patient wife, who like period-costume crime dramas.

There is one notable scene that has some jaw-dropping special effects, where a good spy has a fight with a baddie in a hallway. On its own, this doesn’t sound spectacular; however, the hallway at the time is spinning on its axis.

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Comments

Innovation

Thanks Paul, excellent article, a great point you make and nice to see something from Blighty for a change. I like your take on innovation because you reflect one of my current pet hates, the Solutions First Syndrome (SFS). True innovation only occurs when a solution aligns with a problem as indeed you illustrate both for the worker with his broom stick and the movie director with his huge budget. Many organisations miss this linkage in their so-called "innovation" programmes and suffer from “SFS” that wastes resources and usually makes things worse. Dr Deming talked about the folly of tampering which amounts to the same thing of course. The old adage that "necessity is the mother of invention" seems as pertinent now as ever in establishing that without a clear definition of the problem "innovation" can't really exist.

Creativity and Innovation

I find Paul's story to be one of many, in like kind that may be told, I am sorry to say. Often creative ideas and even people are rejected because there way of thinking and ideas, are often not understood. The reasons for this rejection are well understood by professionals working in the serious problem solving and tools of invention.

A thought provocation: Why is it we hear form leaders aand educators that innovation and creativity is our key to our future as a Nation, yet little is heard regarding means to raise our creative output? How many institutes of education include courses in creative thinking. How many U.S. Government Leaders speak on how we can raise the bar, elevate our level of inventive ideas and achieve break through solutions to problems, whether they be mechanical, electronic, social or governmental?

We as a nation of people, need to come to a call for education, study and effective practice in the field of invention.