Can ANYONE Be Innovative?

Yes and no.

I need to explain that answer.

For 20 years I have been teaching how to improve the brainpower of a team using the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI). The instrument tells your preferences for thinking in four modes: analytical, operational, relational, and strategic. Generally speaking, innovation comes from the strategic quadrant, so people who don't have a preference for thinking in that quadrant think they are not creative or innovative.

If that belief is strong enough, they will often be very reluctant to even try to think of new ideas, and thereby they confirm the belief that they are uncreative.

However, in my workshops I've found that highly analytical thinkers can generate very innovative ideas for different ways of being analytical, and similarly the other quadrant thinkers express their ideas in terms of their preferences.

So ultimately the answer to whether ANYONE can be innovative is a resounding YES, if a person is willing to suspend the belief that they are uncreative.

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Innovate Mate

No, I'm not Australian, but I kept searching for a Blog name that people would remember, and this is the one that struck me as memorable, and also carries a message. As an expression, it tells you to innovate. Innovate, mate, is the way an Aussie might say it, and it is vitally important in today's Present Shock world.

I've always been an innovator. As a technologist, you have to be. I fell in love (literally) with amateur radio when I was about 15 and was a licensed ham radio operator by age 16. I built all of my own equipment or modified existing radios to meet my needs. The local TV repairman gave me an old Montgomery Ward receiver that had shortwave bands on it and I used it as my main receiver for several years. I had to put a bandspread on it to be able to tune slowly and add a BFO to receive Morse code (terms that would take too much time to explain). I even got my BFO addition written up in QST magazine, my very first publication while in High School.

My dream then was to design a state-of-the-art communication receiver, and in 1977 I achieved my dream by leading a team to develop a receiver that was for Shipboard use. It was fully synthesized, tuned in 10 Hz increments, and spanned 15 kHz to 30 mHz. A few years ago I found a review written by a fellow who was also a ham and who had managed to get his hands on one. He raved about it. Boy, did my hat size increase!

The thing is, I have a million ideas--too many to work on. And it is sad to think how many good ideas never become reality, for a variety of reasons. I want this blog to serve two purposes. One, to encourage you to innovate in every facet of your life and two, to share ideas with you on how to do just that. Stay tuned. There's a lot more to come. (And subscribe to be sure you don't miss any of it.)