Creative Collisions

By. Matt Davis, Filene

The skies over Russia lit up last month with a 10,000 ton meteorite. Within a flash 500 kilotons of of energy struck the earth, injuring hundreds and scaring all of humanity. While science can certainly explain this event, the location of the strike and the people involved fit my definition of randomness. From a people, place, and time perspective, there was insufficient information and notice to predict or prepare for this event.

While the world of innovation doesn’t exactly want the death and destruction of such cosmic events, we plan for meteors all the time. With varying degrees of formality and complexity, we all try to orchestrate the next big thing for ourselves and our credit unions. In an inexplicable, individual, and often selfish way we wait for our eureka moment of transformative innovation. We hope that somehow, some way, that we’ll be standing in the right place at the right time for the right muse or stroke of luck to appear.

We’re setting ourselves up for failure.

The only way to predictably find innovation is to facilitate your own creative collisions. The easiest way to pull this off is to surround yourself with the right people. We each have an innovation suitcase that stores our experiences, skill sets, and perspectives. These contents are suitable to bring a wide array, albeit finite amount, of ideas to life. But they aren’t enough. We must be inspired to open it up, look at the available tools, understand what problems exist, and how they can be solved within the confines of accessible resources.

Maker Spaces and co-working offices are popping up all over the world to help talented people affordably work and connect and become inspired by other talented people. They come from a wide variety of industries, interests, networks, and backgrounds. The combinations become better than the sum of their parts. To be creative, you must surround yourself with creativity. Working next to someone else who is creating something interesting, even in a vastly different field, can help you think about your world in a new and interesting way.

Hiring the right people helps, too. Diversity of thinking and intellectual curiosity needs the proper talent. Bring in energetic, smart, and diverse talent, and let them rub elbows. Give them time, formally and casually, to collaborate. Watch how talent brings in more talent, and diversity of experiences drive innovation. See how you can establish an environment that facilitates creative collisions.