Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation demonstrates for the first time how to uncover new connections among observations, experiences, facts, and feelings you didn’t realize were linked, to generate brilliant insights and successful, money-making innovations. Debra Kaye shares how to nurture your rich capacity for insight, develop inventive solutions, build mass advantage, and help your innovative business explode. You can use Red Thread Thinking to sharpen your original-thinking skills, get you through writer’s block, or assist in solving office problems you’re grappling with – preparing a talk, pitching a project to your colleagues and boss, or managing staff in a new and more productive way. Red Thread Thinking can become a way of life, a natural part of how you see the world, ask questions, approach new information, and achieve success.
The theme of the book is based on an Oriental legend, a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations. The tale begins with an elderly god who lives on the moon. Each evening he goes out, taking a huge bag and a great book with him. In the bag are red threads, the ties between those who will find each other in this life. The god’s mission is to link these threads to all the people who will connect in this life in one way or another.
“An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break.” Just as people are destined to meet and connect, so too the best innovations result from unexpected affinities and relationships among history, technology, culture, behavior, needs and emotions. Their destiny to meet and bond is within our reach. These red threads of innovation are the connecting strands of relationships woven of knowledge, memories and insights that together create a multi-textured fabric of seamless inter-connectivity.
The book describes five red threads that we can use to create smart and practical innovations for everyday living. Anyone can develop a knack for this five-thread approach. By weaving together unexpected threads, we become better at tapping into our own broad capacity to get past fixed ideas and assumptions in order to truly think outside of predetermined boxes – and that’s the ultimate business weapon.
In short, you’ll learn to…
• Activate your own knowledge and information base to innovate
• Discern what good insights are and begin to have more and better ones.
• Access your innovative powers – at any age or stage – by firing up your neurons to increase your capacity to make connections that lead to good ideas.
• Use history as a valuable source for future-leaning innovation.
• Demystify trends as traps that tie innovators up in a vicious me-too cycle.
• Mine existing consumer behaviors for successful innovation; ingrained habits are difficult to change without substantial investment; why not tap into them instead and help your innovation explode
• Understand how culture and deeply embedded societal traits are spring-loaded to create mass advantage for you. Observing culture without understanding is diagnosing a symptom rather than curing the disease.
