I’ve helped nearly a million fledgling innovators come up with new ideas and assess which are worth pursuing. I have yet to see a student make this one mistake…

Senior leaders unwittingly jeopardize their organizations by insulating themselves from the pain their users experience. By removing insulation, orgs can feel the pain they should be solving!

It’s easy to dismiss tools like mood boards as “designer speak,” but the truth is, they’ve been indispensable to great thinkers seeking to capture inspiration throughout history.

Martin Luther King was singularly inventive in his oratory. This too-little-known story offers a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of one of the most famous public expressions in U.S. history.

The challenges to creativity inside of large organizations are well documented. But it’s a mistake to assume therefore that nothing creative happens inside of big companies.

Lots does. But it’s often hard to see…

The origin story of Taco Bell’s acclaimed Doritos Loco Taco illuminates one simple principle: most folks’ job is to find flaws in new ideas! Sometimes the best way through is around…

There’s immense power in the knowledge of a network. We’ve got no excuse: Charles Darwin had to wait months for letters to travel the globe, but we can log in and instantaneously exchange knowledge.

I have been consistently disappointed at how few stories are widely-told about remarkable women in the history of innovation. Even so, I was shocked to see research on how broad a phenomenon the underrepresentation truly is.

Pat Brown, Founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, is delighted that many vegetarians refuse to try his product. The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones.

Since connections are the very basis of creativity, anyone who seeks creative output should consider: what fuels new connections? Michael Dell’s early experiments give us a glimpse at a very unexpected answer…

Innovation veteran Johannes Mutzke shares the best way to answer the perennial “build or buy” decision facing organizations seeking to enter new markets.

Contrarians are valuable. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both used this government-developed toolkit for identifying strategic vulnerabilities and unlocking growth.

What do Elon Musk and Albert Einstein have in common? Both of them were willing to examine things that other people dismissed as too trivial to warrant their attention.

Ben Franklin is one of history’s most prolific innovators, with breakthroughs ranging from literature to science to civics. How’d he do it? A simple but profound weekly ritual to spur fresh thinking.

Uri Levine is a “Duocorn” (two-time unicorn founder) on a mission to help innovators find their calling. They key, he says, is to “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”

How do you court the muse? Innovators from Jeff Bezos to Victor Hugo to Jerry Seinfeld teach us embrace every bit of inspiration as soon as it arrives - by writing it down.

How did André 3000 find his voice as a young artist? He and Rick Rubin dug deep into the creative process and illuminate the value of critical feedback.

Design is an inherently optimistic field. We are, after all, trying to make the world a better place. But this optimism can lead to naïveté, and can actually hinder real progress, if left unchecked.

One of the most fantastic definitions I’ve ever heard comes from an anonymous seventh grader in Ohio: “Creativity is doing more than the first thing that comes to your mind.”

The rules for what smart people are supposed to do are often at odds with what those same smart people do to court a breakthrough. What gives?