MKT 322 Creative Thinking, Balaski

Describe the three ways in which our brains try to get out of higher-order thinking

-Monkey mind, Distraction- Not focused thinking, hard to control, daydreaming -Gator brain, Reaction- instincts treat creating thinking as a threat -Elephant tether, Patterning- follow these rather than generate thoughts

Discuss specific tactics used to stimulate creative thinking.

-Quantity over quality -Designate a person to call out critical thinking

Explain how creative and critical thinking are used together in the productive thinking process (2-step process)

1. Creative thinking generates ideas 2. Critical thinking organizes and gives meaning to ideas -Cluster- look for underlying connections -Label- represents all items in cluster, meaningful -Select- consider specific criteria recommended for each stage

List the 5 stages of the productive thinking process and state end goal

1. What's going on? Understand issue and create Target Future 2. What's success? Create success criteria and a clear, amazing target future 3.What's the question? Define questions (Catalytic Questions) that must be answered to attain target future 4. Generate answers. Develop possible answers for Cataltyic questions 5. Forge the solution. Take most promising ideas and turn them into tested solutions for the questions

Describe innovation in your own words. Explain the role of innovation in marketing.

A breakthrough that changes our daily lives, completely new idea not based off of previous ideas. Creative thinking leads to innovation, and critical thinking narrows those ideas to the most innovative.

Explain the process of turning creative thoughts into true innovation

Creative thoughts are generated, then processed critically to find the idea with the most potential, then the idea is put into action and built upon to reach true innovation

Discuss the specific tools that are used to transform preliminary solutions into a single strong and powerful solution

Evaluate solutions and compare them to the Success Criteria. Stress-test, refine, and improve selected solution

Describe the three types of information we can store in memory.

Facts- more apt to forget How to do things- simple math Personal experience- easiest to recall

Define creative thinking.

Generates ideas using creativity and quantity. Looking at thinks in novel and immaginative ways

Describe "creativity" in your own words. Explain the role of creativity in marketing.

Imaginative thoughts that serve a purpose and should be put into action Allow us to come up with new ways of doing things and break out of marketing patterns (unmarketing)

Explain how memory and processing work together in the thinking process

Memory works with the processing to form our own thoughts and opinions. without memory, there is nothing to process. Thoughts are processed as they more from sensory to long-term memory

Compare and contrast productive and reproductive thinking

Productive thinking- generates new ideas and opinions, creates true innovation through creative and critical thinking Reproductive thinking- refining what we already know, "just the way we do it"

Discuss the specific selection criteria used at the end of step 2 in stages 1 - 4

Select- (Stage 1 ID KEY PROBLEM) How important it is How interesting it is How challenging it is (stage 2 DEVELOP A TARGET FUTURE STATEMENT) importance imagination influence

Explain the role of "Quality vs. Quantity" in the 2-step process

The most innovative ideas are found in the Third Third. Not every idea has to be perfect. Most people stop after the first or second third, but when we push past that block, we find truly creative and new ideas

Explain the barriers to creative thinking.

We must change the negatives to positives -"I'm not a creative"-- be curious and inquisitive -"It can't be done"-- "It can be done" -"I might fail"-- see the good in the bad -Avoiding problems-- seek out problems -Psychological blocks--Flexible imagination -Preconception-- challenge assumption

Discuss the difficulty in separating the creative thinking process from the critical thinking process.

We naturally tend to think critically, so we must teach ourselves not to think w gator brain and shut down creative ideas

Compare and contrast critical and creative thinking.

critical- Uses specific criteria to judge the quality of something using data and facts creative- generates ideas using imagination and quantity

Explain how the three parts of our brain impact the relationship between reaction, thinking, and emotion

o Cerebral cortex- human brain, thinking o Limbic system- mammalian brain, emotion o Stem brain- Gator brain, instincts -We react w gator brain first, then emotion w mammalian brain, last think with human brain

Define "thinking" in your own words

storing info into your memory, recalling it, and processing that info in order to come up with your own thoughts and opinions.

Evaluate the negative impacts of technology on thinking.

tech is detrimental to thinking as it allows for easy retrieval of info thus making memory irrelevant.

Describe the bottom-up approach to clustering ideas

the process of relating items that have underlying connections rather than connections that are obvious. -opposite of the top down approach -label then select