Innovation and creativity are things that people have come to expect from marketing. In fact, it's almost a stigma in certain circles that if you're from marketing, you're somehow blessed with innate creativity.

I guess we're all creative in some ways, but there's always room for improvement. Here's 10 ideas from the Apptility weblog on ways to develop the creative mind.

Ways to develop creative mind

1. Travel to new places.
   
2. Read from a variety of fields. (Hell, Just READ!)
   
3. Become curious about everything.
   
4. Attend professional meetings and seminars.
   
5. Join professional groups and associations.
   
6. Talk to anyone and everyone about your subject.
   
7. Develop a subject library for future reference.
   
8. Carry a small notebook and record useful information.
   
9. Scan magazines, newspapers and journals for articles related to your subject.
   
10. Evaluate ideas. Record what aspects of ideas are good and what aspects appear irrelevant or are not feasible because of constraints.
    

While these are all great ideas (and I honestly practice most of them, because, trust me, I need all the creativity I can get) there is almost always a void in execution. For example, I have a couple "creative" ideas that were spawned from my reading The McKinsey Mind, which pertain to using the approach of Category Management to organically grow your business by taking over functions of your customer's business where they are weak, and you have acute knowledge and strength. I like to call these times "convergence moments" because they are a convergence of ideas from different disciplines that combine to make something pretty interesting.

If you're looking for more on convergence, or combining interesting ideas, have a look at this post from the Manyworlds Business Blog on combining ideas using Fusion, Fission, Transposition and Abstraction.