Innovation generation

"Whether you are a student or an established scientist, researcher, or engineer, you can learn to be more innovative. In Innovation Generation, internationally renowned physician and scientist Roberta Ness provides all the tools you need to cast aside your habitual ways of navigating the every-day world and to think "outside the box." Based on an extraordinarily successful program at the University of Texas, this book provides proven techniques to expand your ability to generate original ideas. These tools include analogy, expanding assumptions, pulling questions apart, changing your point of view, reversing your thinking, and getting the most out of multidisciplinary groups, to name a few. Woven into the discussion are engaging stories of famous scientists who found fresh paths to innovation, including groundbreaking primate scientist Jane Goodall, father of lead research Herb Needleman, and physician Ignaz Semmelweis, whose discovery of infection control saved millions. Finally, the book shows how to combine your newly acquired skills in innovative thinking with the normal process of scientific thinking, so that your new abilities are more than playthings. Innovation will power your science"-- "Innovation Generation presents a fascinating new approach to creative thinking. Using a system of idea-generating methods honed over her illustrious career as a physician, researcher, professor, teacher, and Dean, Roberta Ness provides all the tools needed to learn how to cast aside habitual cognitive maps called frames and draw insights from other fields. The tools focus in on developing a good scientific question: how to expand it to reveal a larger one, pull it into component parts, and turn it on its head to flip cause and effect. Readers will also learn how to change points of view and work more effectively in multidisciplinary groups. Finally, this book coaches readers on incorporating newly acquired innovation tools into the normal scientific process. In so doing, Innovation Generation is a valuable method for advancing scientific aspirations. "-- Provided by publisher.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.