http://www.inventium.com.au/ HBack in 2006, Inventium’s founder, Dr Amantha Imber was working as a consumer psychologist in a big advertising agency. The agency had put her through a lot of creative thinking training which she loved. However, when she started getting deeper into researching the field, she realised that all these training companies had done was rip off Edward de Bono techniques from the 70s and re-package them as their own. She thought that, ironically, this was pretty uncreative.

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Inventium
http://www.inventium.com.au/
Back in 2006, Inventium’s founder, Dr Amantha Imber was working as a
consumer psychologist in a big advertising agency. The agency had put
her through a lot of creative thinking training which she loved.
However, when she started getting deeper into researching the field,
she realised that all these training companies had done was rip off
Edward de Bono techniques from the 70s and re-package them as their
own. She thought that, ironically, this was pretty uncreative.

2. p. +61 3 9018 7455
f. +61 3 9528 4787
m. +61 (0) 412 6565 38
e. info@inventium .com .au
PO Box 1251, Brighton Rd LPO, Elwood,
VIC, Australia 3184
Amantha had always been a bit of a science geek and kept reading the
jargon-filled academic journals long after leaving university. She noticed
that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of studies being conducted
around the world that looked at what variables increased a person’s
ability to think more creatively and a company’s ability to innovate.
However, she realised that there was a great divide between this great
research that was being done in the world of academia, and what was
actually getting used in the ‘real world’.
So in 2007, she had the idea of starting a company that applied the
science of psychology and neurology to boosting creativity and
innovation - something that had never been done before. Since
Inventium opened its doors, Amantha and her team, have helped
literally thousands of people across Australia, the United States, the UK,
Europe, Africa and New Zealand improve their ability to generate great
ideas.
Get happy to get creative

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Get happy to get creative
Our emotional state has a big impact on our
ability to think creatively. Researchers at
Pennsylvania State University conducted a
study which examined the impact of happy
and sad moods on idea generation. To put
them into the required mood, participants
were first asked to describe a recent life
event that made them feel happy or sad.
Following the mood manipulation,
participants were asked to write down as
many things they could think of that could
fly. On average, participants in the happy
group came up with almost 50% more ideas
than the sad group.
The happiness hypothesis was also explored
by Teresa Amabile at Harvard University.
Amabile asked several hundred people to
keep a work diary that detailed their daily
activities, moods and other workplace
events. An analysis of these diary entries
showed that people were more likely to
come up with breakthrough ideas when
they were feeling happy, even if this
happiness was experienced the day before
the idea was generated.
When we are happy, the level of a brain
chemical called dopamine increases. In the
frontal lobe, dopamine controls the flow of
information to other parts of the brain.
When people feel happy, thoughts or
images of one concept – such as ‘thick’ –
activate thoughts or images of many other
concepts – such as ‘paint’, ‘stupid’ or ‘make-
up’. Opening up connections between
concepts that are only remotely associated
with one another increases our ability for
divergent thinking. In contrast, when
people feel sad, they become more detail-
oriented with their thinking which means
that they often will not see the greater
possibilities. In other words, they get
focused on the trees to the exclusion of the
forest.
So if you are feeling a bit flat, chances are
you are probably not performing at your
peak creativity. The common image of the
‘tortured genius’ has fed the popular belief
that the majority of creative geniuses were
depressed and emotionally unbalanced.
However, studies have shown that people
are actually more creative when they are
happy.

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Warm Up Your Brain To
Improve Creative Thinking
For those of us who exercise regularly,
doing a big workout without a warm-up
seems silly. Our risk of injury increases
dramatically and it also makes it hard for us
to perform at our best. Similarly, it is critical
to warm up your brain before engaging it in
a creative-thinking workout. This is to
combat the fact that in general, most idea-
generation and problem-solving meetings
are scheduled immediately after a strategy
or finance meeting, in which your brain was
most likely in analytical or linear gear.
Most of us can appreciate how difficult it is
to come from a meeting that requires
analytical, rational thinking into a meeting
that requires us to think laterally (that is,
thinking outside of our usual frame of
reference). When your brain has been in
linear thinking mode, coming up with
creative solutions is very difficult. The brain
naturally wants to jump to logical solutions,
given the mode it is in, and finding lateral
and creative solutions becomes
unnecessarily difficult.
Scientific research suggests that warming
up the creative-thinking parts of your brain
will help you perform more effectively and
efficiently at creative tasks. These exercises
will make it easier to jump from a finance
meeting to an idea-generation meeting.
Warming up this part of your brain only
takes a few minutes to shift your brain into
an open-minded and lateral-thinking mode.
There are many ways to warm up you brain
to this type of thinking. One is an Inventium
tool called Fat Chance. Fat Chance was
designed with the specific purpose of
warming up the creative-thinking parts of
people’s brains. The tool can be used before
30-minute idea-generation and problem-
solving workshops or one-day blue-sky
thinking workshops in which brains need to
think laterally for an entire day.
Fat Chance requires no materials or stimuli
other than one thing: an impossible
challenge. For example, cure cancer by
tomorrow lunchtime. There are two key
elements to creating an impossible
challenge. The first is to pick a goal or an
objective that is almost impossible to
achieve with technology as we know it

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VIC, Australia 3184
today. The second is to add an incredibly
tight time frame. The tighter the better. For
example, Raise Paris Hilton’s IQ by 100
points by the end of the week. Give birth to
an alien by dinner tonight. Marry Brad Pitt
by noon tomorrow.
After you have developed an impossible
challenge, the next step is to divide the
participants into pairs or groups of three.
This gives everyone a good chance to
participate. Once groups are assigned,
instruct people to generate at least three
solutions to the problem in five minutes.
Encourage those who are finding it difficult
and remind them that the solutions do not
have to be logical or rational – in fact, those
solutions won’t actually solve the problem.
After these five minutes have passed, you
can feel confident that the divergent
thinking parts of people’s brains will be
sufficiently warmed up.
Why does this tool work so effectively? It all
comes back to the impossibility of the
challenge. Given that it is impossible, non-
creative thinking will not lead to a solution.
The problem can only be solved through
taking a leap and thinking very creatively
and laterally. For example, in relation to the
Paris Hilton problem, some solutions might
include bribing the instructor for the
answers, making the IQ test about fashion
rather than general knowledge, or finding
another person named Paris Hilton who
happens to be very smart. Despite the
‘craziness’ of these problems and answers,
groups have then gone on to generate
innovative solutions to real life problems
they were facing.
Eyeing off creativity
In general, the left side of our brain directs
our logical and rule-based decisions; similar
perhaps to a stern headmaster. On the
other hand, the right side tends to be more
inventive and intuitive. Research out of
New Jersey has gone a step further and
found a way to maximise both the left and
right brain hemispheres, leading to highly
practical and highly creative ideas.
The researchers got their participants to
complete a standard creativity test then
split the participants into two groups. One
group was instructed to follow a target that

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PO Box 1251, Brighton Rd LPO, Elwood,
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moved from left to right for 30 seconds,
while the second group looked straight
ahead for the same time.
The participants then completed the same
creative idea generation test. Keeping in
mind that the participants shared
comparable creativity before being split
into groups, the participants who followed
the moving target were much more creative
than those who stared at the wall.
The researchers concluded that moving
your eyes from side-to-side increases the
communication between the left and right
side of the brain, thus resulting in more
useful and creative ideas.
So if your brain is still recovering from the
weekend and you need a kick start, get
those eyes dancing from side-to-side and
feel your brain sing.