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"Considering I'm a creative coach, some people are surprised to learn I'm a little sceptical about creative thinking techniques. For one thing, there's a lot more to creativity than thinking. It's possible to sit around having lots of creative thoughts, but without actually making anything of them. But if you start making something, creative ideas seem to emerge naturally out of the process. So if I had to choose, I'd say creative doing beats creative thinking. And for another thing, a lot of 'creative thinking techniques' leave me cold. Brainstorming, lateral thinking and (shudder) thinking outside the box have always felt a bit corporate and contrived to me. I've never really used them myself, and after working with hundreds of artists and creatives over the last 14 years, I've come across plenty of other creative professionals who don't use them. I don't think you can reduce creative thinking to a set of techniques. And I don't think the process is as conscious and deliberate as these approaches imply."

"For Usher, creativity is not something a lucky few are born with. Instead, it's a skill that takes hard work and discipline to develop and hone. According to the 46-year-old, "Creativity is not a science. But it's also not magic, either. It's a learnable skill, and anyone can learn to be more creative." Learning how to be creative, however, takes time and practice, and to that effect, Usher offered several tips to attendees to help get them started on the path to being more creative. Related Reading Technology | Building a World of Sound and Shapes Technology | To All My Independent Artists According to Usher, the greatest obstacle to being creative is a combination of fear and resistance. As we grow up, we learn the rules and limits that govern our lives. That is, the codes of love, life, work, and law become intrinsic to how we function as a human being, and we quickly learn to love those rules, because they bring about predictable and dependable outcomes. After all, it's as Usher says, "When I'm driving a car, I love the fact that you will stop at a red light." Real-life needs rules to function properly and effectively, but being creative, by its very nature, entails stepping out of one's comfort zone and embracing potentially disastrous outcomes. "

What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford; 336 pages). He's working on a version for the lay reader, due out in 2007 from Basic Books. In an interview with Francine Russo, Sawyer shares some of his findings and suggests ways in which we can enhance our creativity not just in art, science or business but in everyday life.

"What is creative strategy? It's a classic case of "theory to practice." My previous book, Strategic Intuition, laid out the theory. It explained the science of how creative ideas happen in the human mind and documented how successful innovators actually came up with their innovations. This new book, Creative Strategy, is the practice: it shows how to apply that theory as an innovation method yourself. Here's how it works: you start with a problem or situation where you aim for an innovation, break that down in to elements of the problem, and then search for precedents that solve each element. You then see a subset of these precedents come together in your mind as a new combination that solves the problem. That idea is your innovation"

Innovation is the name of the game these days - in business, in science and technology, even in art. We all want to get those big ideas, but most of us really have no idea what sets off those sparks of insight. Science can help! In the past few years, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to gain a better understanding of the creative process. Some triggers of innovation may be surprisingly simple. Here are five things that may well increase the odds of having an "Aha!" moment.

"Much like other crossover sensations from the creative world such as design thinking and information design, the visual thinking phenomenon has sustained interest for some time now. From the most staid corporate institutions to the most enlightened young startups, visual thinking techniques are being sought after as part of a new business toolkit in the quest to create "cultures of innovation." Post-its, whiteboards, and flipcharts are infiltrating once stodgy conference rooms and work spaces. Unbridled creativity - not industrial-era efficiency - is the key to better products, smarter services, and increased profit. But behind the glowing promise of the vizthink movement, a challenge persists for many in the business world: how best to harness the power of visual thinking to achieve real results?"

What makes the cartoon light bulb of creativity go off over someone's head? What is the catalyst for groundbreaking inventions and innovative breakthroughs? In his illuminating new book, the journalist Jonah Lehrer explicates some now-classic case studies.

Somewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs-the technique of magnetic resonance imaging-tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer's newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it's often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

"Thinking. The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It's what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized. Thinking encompasses so many aspects of who our children are and what they do, from observing, learning, remembering, questioning, and judging to innovating, arguing, deciding, and acting."

"We are in a period of massively disruptive and unprecedented change. One of the first victims of massive and disruptive change for many businesses today is certainty. There just doesn't seem to be enough certainty left in the world to go around. More than ever before we are confronting uncertainty, and its two siblings ambiguity and contradiction."

"What does it mean to socialize the enterprise? Often, the primary focus of this term is the outward-facing social media strategy of the company and/or the social collaboration infrastructure it uses. But in reality, these two aspects are just the tip of the iceberg. A socialized enterprise incorporates the entire stakeholder landscape and platforms for bridging these connections: the consumer-facing social media strategy of the company, collaboration within the organization and the way the company interacts with clients and, no less important, its external partners."

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves-the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the capacity to learn from experience. Early results were promising. Computers were programmed to play checkers and chess, to prove theorems in geometry, to solve analogy puzzles from IQ tests, to recognize letters of the alphabet. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers, declared in 1961: "We are on the threshold of an era that will be strongly influenced, and quite possibly dominated, by intelligent problem-solving machines."

For most of us, it usually occurs at the most inopportune times; never when we're searching for it. To Archimedes, it happened in the bathtub. Newton experienced it while wandering an apple orchard. Arthur Fry: church. Each encountered an epiphany, that powerful moment of spontaneous insight. Archimedes shouted Eureka! upon realizing how to calculate density and volume; to Newton came the law of universal gravity; to Arthur Fry, Post-it notes.

Leaders are expected to operate at such a rapid pace and high level in this business environment that critical-thinking skills are paramount for success. Even though critical thinking may seem like a soft or unquantifiable skill, it's actually a key competency for leaders who operate in today's business climate. In fact, the lack of critical thinking can lead to questionable decisions, which in turn could potentially tarnish a business' reputation.

A great deal has changed since the term eLearning first entered the vocabulary in 1999 and since web-based courses and modules started appearing in volume in the early 2000s. We need to rethink eLearning in light of these changes and other changes (like Social Learning) that are only now starting to impact the world of work. I'm sure most of us are aware that the major challenge for learning is no longer about 'content' or 'knowledge' (if it ever were).