Is innovation being squelched during belt-tightening optimization efforts? If long term benefits aren’t balanced with short term gains, that’s often the case. Passion is quickly extinguished when new ideas meet with budget constraints that can’t be disregarded for the sake of innovation or creativity. It’s time to look at ways to protect and nourish the passion to innovate and create.

Creativity is perhaps most evident in young children as they joyfully discover new ideas and concepts. As adults, we are still happiest when we’re discovering. We love innovating. It’s innovation that’s at work when we apply what we know about one thing to make something else work better or quicker. What if we could increase our rates of innovation?

To uncover best practices, I talked with North Carolina Research Triangle innovators. What better place to look than right here near home? North Carolina is rich in knowledge assets and the Research Triangle is known for innovation. Friends from companies such as Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and SAS talked with me about their top 12 ways to inspire creativity in tough times. Below are tips for awaking your joy of discovery.

1. Apply past solutions to new problems to bring fresh ideas and best practices into your current role.
2. Re-engineer your job role by pulling apart the basics of the job requirements from the history of the role, including the tools previously used, to find new ways to get the job done.
3. Celebrate staff and peers when they think outside the box. Meaningful rewards can include receiving additional responsibility, autonomy, and authority (yes, more work is good).
4. To break out of the mold, create an innovation forum where people anonymously contribute questions, solutions and other ideas to be displayed for use by all.
5. Challenge “business as usual” by investigating issues and speaking out about your findings. As uncomfortable as this may be for others, you’ll learn a lot if you poke around to understand root causes of problems.
6. Interview “internal customers” from other departments to understand their unmet, and maybe unexpressed, needs.
7. Construct alternative ways to view problems and opportunities. When proposing new ways to do things, stand behind your potential solutions while asking others to propose alternative solutions.
8. Leverage diverse resources for ideas and inspiration. Study Web sites, books and even TV shows to glean ideas.
9. Draw a picture, look at art or think about the emotions words convey in order to spark creativity when trying to solve a problem.
10. Use techniques such as mind mapping to view a product or service from other perspectives so you can better appeal to and inspire those you’re trying to reach.
11. Think expansively—even illogically to find new solutions. Try to temporarily disregard constraints and focus just on the outcome.
12. After major projects, put away the supporting material so you can focus on the new project. This clean slate makes way for new ideas.

What puts out the fire of creativity? Innovators say reporting does, because it shifts our minds from forward thinking pursuits and creative planning to historical events. Managers can fan the flames of creativity by, rather, asking staff to set goals for improvement in their area of responsibility.

We can reward entire teams for accomplishments to promote collaboration. As an individual reward, we can give staff who perform creatively more responsibility.

Some widely used creativity techniques, such as brainstorming, are often frustrating and ineffective. Why? People are seldom open because they see that their ideas are evaluated on the spot rather than just recorded by moderators.

All is not well in even the most successful of companies. There is often a lack of trust among various levels of management in large companies, so information isn’t shared. As a result, employees may never really know how their ideas solved problems or created new opportunities for the company. Managers can close the feedback loop by gathering and delivering relevant feedback.

We’re on the right track by caring enough to learn these things from each other. Is it time to awaken your joy of discovery? What are some of the (unusual) ways you use to boost your ability to innovate?