It’s easy to dismiss tools like mood boards as “designer speak,” but the truth is, they’ve been indispensable to great thinkers seeking to capture inspiration throughout the generations.

Martin Luther King was singularly inventive in his oratory. This too-little-known story offers a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of one of the most famous public expressions in U.S. history.

The origin story of Taco Bell’s acclaimed Doritos Loco Taco illuminates one simple principle: most folks’ job is to find flaws in new ideas! Sometimes you need to bypass bureaucracy entirely…

Actively soliciting contributions from others is a great way to reveal assumptions, challenge bias, and see new possibilities. It hurts, but it’s worth it.

There’s immense power in the knowledge of a network. And while Charles Darwin had to wait months for letters to travel the globe, we can log on and instantaneously exchange knowledge.

I have been consistently disappointed at how few stories are widely-told about remarkable women in the history of innovation. Yet even so, I was shocked to see research on how broad a phenomenon the underrepresentation truly is.

To describe Fenty Beauty as having revolutionized the beauty industry is an understatement: by obliterating the “acceptable spectrum” of color, they literally changed the definition of beauty. Such “experience gaps” are an incredible opportunity for innovation.

The best entrepreneurs are just as deft at disqualifying customers as they are at attracting new ones. Pat Brown is delighted by the fact that many vegetarians refuse to try the Impossible Burger because it disgusts them — but that’s ok: they’re not his target customer!

If connection is the basis of creativity, anyone who wants to be more creative should ask: what fuels new connections? Michael Dell’s early experiments give us a glimpse at a very unexpected answer…

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos both employed a government-developed mindset and toolkit for identifying strategic organizational vulnerabilities and unlocking growth opportunities.

What do Elon Musk and Albert Einstein have in common? Both of them were willing to examine things that other people dismissed as too trivial to warrant their attention.

Bill Pacheco, gifted design thinking practitioner and instructor, sheds light on a critical element to building empathy: giving others the space to explore feelings they may not have explored before.

Innovation veteran Johannes Mutzke shares the best way to answer the perennial “build or buy” decision facing organizations seeking to enter new markets.

Ben Franklin is one of the most prolific innovators in history, with breakthroughs ranging from literature to science to civics. How’d he do it? A simple but profound weekly ritual to spur fresh thinking.

Inspiration is fleeting. No matter how good one’s capture mechanisms are, they’re limited by one’s discipline to actually write ideas down. Victor Hugo’s discipline to capture fueled stories that have endured.

André 3000 shines a light on a critical component of the creative process in a recent interview with Rick Rubin. As much as we love compliments, it’s our critics who often help illuminate the rough patches.

Design is an optimistic pursuit. But can lead to naïveté, if left unchecked. What most designers need is a healthy dose of skepticism to compliment the optimism with which they approach their efforts.

Steve Jobs said, “Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.”

Whitney Burks says, “Don’t go with the first thing that comes to mind. The truly great ideas are the ones that come after that.” The sad irony is that NOT expecting better ideas to come along is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The rules of creative genius are not only opposed to many of the rules of being smart, they even seem to be at odds with one another! Deal with it…