Get to work!
You can't be creative by sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike you. The only way to create is to build your skills and knowledge, dig in and try out new ideas, even if you're pretty sure they won't lead you to the desired outcome. According to creativity expert Natalie Goldberg, "No matter what you do, the first step to tapping creativity is showing up. Tell yourself that you're going to write for 10 minutes, and then physically move your hand across the page for that amount of time. Maybe you'll produce only one good line, but that's a lot more than you would accomplish by just sitting there." (Jill Rosenfeld, "Here's an Idea! Unit of One," Fast Company, April, 2000.)

More about creativity in business

Don't try too hard to be new
Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramics designer, insists that you don't have to focus on originality to create. Here's how she suggests you get started with an idea: "If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means you're focusing on not doing what's been done before. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas—not even in business or technology. Creativity starts when you put a line on paper. Then you talk to that line. You make it a partner in conversation. You see that the line can go in different directions: you can make it go left or right, or you can add branches to it. You can think critically about it; you can decide that it is too fat or too thin. You can envision what you want the line to look like. But, whatever you do, don't think about where you can't go. If you sit down at a drafting table with the intention of making something new, you'll end up flustered. Creative people always run the risk of making something that already exists, but it's better to create something than nothing. You can throw it away or change it if you want to, but at least you've put down that first line, and started a conversation with yourself."(Jill Rosenfeld, "Here's an Idea! Unit of One," Fast Company, April, 2000.)

More techniques for creative thinking

You are creative
Here's a big don't. Don't say, "I'm not creative." Creative people have diverse skills and ways of thinking. A few people may be born with innate genius, but most of us learn creativity as a skill, through life experience, and by challenging our own conventional problem-solving patterns.

Resources for creativity and innovation

Your nice, normal, creative self
Rollo May separates the view of creativity as a recreational practice from Plato's view of "true artists," those who give birth to a new reality. May writes,

"We are not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time...The creative process must be explored as...representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of normal people in the act of actualizing themselves.

Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother's normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster's rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being." (Rollo May, The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975.)

If you go by May's definition, any time you express yourself by solving a problem in a new way, you're behaving creatively. If you find yourself long on the desire to solve problems and short on the ideas, you can strengthen your creative powers by giving them plenty of fresh air and exercise!

Thinking outside the box

Creativity takes active engagement
May maintains that every creative act begins with an encounter—a confrontation between the creator and the idea or problem to be solved. In some cases, a certain amount of willpower is involved. In every case, the creative act is achieved through the creator's active engagement in the idea. Creative solutions are often reached after many unsuccessful attempts. As Thomas Edison put it, "Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work."

How idea companies get their ideas
Questions to get the creative juices flowing
Qualities of entrepreneurial achievers (audio file) (pdf transcript)