Innovation Generation and Creativity in the Sciences

Whether you are a student or an established scientist, researcher, or engineer, you can learn to be more innovative. In Innovation Generation, internationally renowned physician and scientist Roberta Ness provides all the tools you need to cast aside your habitual ways of navigating the every-day world and to think "outside the box." Based on an extraordinarily successful program at the University of Texas, this book provides proven techniques to expand your ability to generate original ideas. These tools include analogy, expanding assumptions, pulling questions apart, changing your point of view, reversing your thinking, and getting the most out of multidisciplinary groups, to name a few. Woven into the discussion are engaging stories of famous scientists who found fresh paths to innovation, including groundbreaking primate scientist Jane Goodall, father of lead research Herb Needleman, and physician Ignaz Semmelweis, whose discovery of infection control saved millions.

Creativity in the Sciences, a workbook companion to Innovation Generation, provides over 150 exercises and activities to hone creative problem-solving skills. Workbook tasks include improvisation, insight exercises, and generative skill building. Each chapter addresses doubts that individuals harbor concerning their ability to improve their innovative output, the techniques to work around frames, metaphors and biases in thinking, manipulatives to rearrange problem conceptualization, insight, intuition, collective innovative output from groups, and social and environmental factors that affect creative thinking. The workbook features straightforward and heuristic exercises for both individuals and groups.

Now available at a special bundled price, these two books will show how to combine your newly acquired skills in innovative thinking with the normal process of scientific thinking, so that your new abilities are more than playthings. Innovation will power your science.

Roberta B. Ness is Dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health and the University of Texas - Houston Vice President for Innovation. She is also an internationally renowned physician, scientist, and author of over 300 scientific papers and books.

Michael L. Goodman is a public health scientist and practitioner with interests in global health, as well as health disparities in the United States. He is active with community health projects in Sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America, and enjoys applying innovative thinking practices to the unique problems that arise in settings with limited resources.

Aisha S. Dickerson is a doctoral candidate in epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Her main research interests, which focus on the possible causes of autism, include gene-environment interactions in autism cases, and further understanding this developmental disorder through innovative research studies.