61 | Tina Seelig on what to do with a really bad idea

Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops with an entrepreneurial focus. In this episode, Tina emphasizes the importance of living in the problem space longer, taking time to challenge assumptions and reframe questions before rushing to solutions. We discuss how deliberately generating bad ideas can lead to innovative solutions, as they allow for bigger conceptual leaps and often contain the seeds of brilliant ideas. Treating ideas as less precious allows for a continuous flow of creativity. But ideas aren’t cheap – they are free but incredibly valuable, like oxygen.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:28 Teaching creativity
• 7:05 “Framestorming” and “Pretotypes”
• 11:00 On having a mental model of failure
• 15:17 Strategizing brainstorming
• 18:01 Power of bad ideas
• 20:51 Thanking our sponsor
• 21:16 “There is a million dollars in every room”
• 24:28 Basking in the problem space
• 25:43 Ideas are like oxygen