THINK INSIDE THE BOX means to innovate within the constraints defined by the box. It's a 'constraint-based innovation' and the idea behind it is to understand your constraints and utilize them to innovate beyond the box. The box can be an Organization, Government, Startup, or a Team. And as you make progress those constraints can change over time.
Asking The Right Questions help establish the right constraints — ones that create boxes that are useful, but different, from the boxes people currently think-in. These boxes (boundaries/constraints) in-turn help people with focused thinking and prevent them from straying.
What matters is to ask "Questions" that have the potential to uncover the kind of extraordinary innovations like Amazon, Google, eBay, and PayPal.
“What question would have caused me to see this opportunity first?” — In other words, “reverse engineer” every great idea or innovation you see.
Think Inside The Box does NOT mean to constraint the thinking of people but to better orchestrate the process.
People are at their most creative self when they focus on the internal aspects of a situation or problem at hand — and when they constrain their options rather than broaden them. By defining and then closing the boundaries of a particular creative problem, most of us can be more consistently creative — and certainly more productive. The most consequential ideas are often right under our noses, connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world.
Innovation works best when we utilize an exceptional and uncommon way of creative thinking, when we challenge the existing norm, assumptions and develop new approaches, when we THINK DIFFERENTLY. Innovation is a thinking activity ... key is how can we manage our thinking, so it is understandable, reliable and repeatable.
Creativity is rarely achieved by wildly divergent thinking. Using "inside the box" innovation techniques involves retraining the way your brain thinks about “problem solving”. Most people think innovation starts with establishing a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. Think Inside The Box takes an abstract, conceptual solution and find a problem that it can solve.
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