Moe and Tina Seelig discuss how to make imaginative ideas a reality.
Bringing Your Idea to Life
Since it’s founding in 1999, Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program has been a pillar for innovation and entrepreneurship. Its experiential curriculum, world-class faculty, and design thinking framework not only stretches the imagination of its participants; more importantly, it infuses each of them with a skill set that will help them navigate the most difficult of challenges.
I had an opportunity this week to speak with Executive Director, and esteemed professor, Tina Seelig about her new book, Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World, and she reinforced once again, that at Stanford, creativity and entrepreneurship are first and foremost a mindset. It’s a new model that she calls ‘the Invention Cycle’, which fuses together a hierarchy of skills, starting with imagination. In her words, “imagination is envisioning things that do not exist; creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge, innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions, and entrepreneurship is applying innovation to bring unique ideas to fruition.”
As any entrepreneurs will attest, bringing any idea to life requires rigor and incredible persistence, still if you’re disciplined to follow a process that provides such a proven pathway, your odds of success spiral upwards. In this conversation with Tina, we’ll discuss the tools and techniques that give Stanford entrepreneurs their edge:
- The entrepreneurial mindset
- Why being entrepreneurial can take you farther than just starting a company
- The Invention Cycle at work
- The 3 creativity tools that will ignite your imagination
- The mental shift to go from incremental to exponential thinking
- The super myth of discovering your passion
- An exercise to reframe the story you tell yourself about yourself