You need fule for your creative mind, and you need material to steal for your own purposes. Beyond the obvious benefit of knowinf what's happening in your field, being well-read gives you lots of apparetnly unrelated material to draw upon in thinking about challenges and problems.

Tip 2: Keep a Notebook

Keep a small notebook (or a big one, it doesn't matter) to record your observations, questions, and ideas, as well as any facts that strike you as interesting. The information you record does not necessarily have to relate to any current challenges. This notebook is primarily a way of creating a resource for future use. You may also require your managers to maintain similar notebooks. The more dynamic and competitive your organization's environment is, the more likely these notebooks are to be important.

Tip 3: Think in Two Phases

Most creativity gurus will agree that you should seperate the idea generation and idea evaluation phases of problem solving. This keeps you from killing potentially valuable ideas that seem impractical on first examination. That negative impression may be accurate, or it may the result of bias, or of an important consideration that hasn't occiurred to you just yet. In any case, a wildly impractical idea may be used to identify something else that is workable.

More tips are coming soon!