Here's how you can unlock your creative potential and conquer creative blocks.

Failure is an opportunity to learn the gaps in one's work. It cannot be learnt without trials. It is essential to adopt a limited trial and error approach, but with caution. While pursuing PhD, I had intended to publish a specific wireless transceiver architecture, for which I had to conduct a few experimental validations. Due to long lead time for one of the important components, I decided to make it in my workshop. Unfortunately, the performance was worse than expected due to fabrication tolerances. I couldn't submit my paper before deadline. But, understanding the cause of that bad performance gave me an idea about how that aspect could be used for another purpose where I deliberately distort my signal of interest leading to a patent.

It is essential to seek inspiration from several natural phenomena such as beaver dams, hunting strategy of wolves, sharing child responsibilities by multiple elephant couples in a herd, etc to appreciate perseverance and teamwork. Records of military histories reveal that the greatest generals were those who respected and cared for every soldier under their command and who led from the front. Such units had the best cohesion! Seeking inspiration from generals like Julius Caesar, Surena, Germanicus, SFJH Maneckshaw, Dwight D Eisenhover benefits in learning and practsing leadership skills to keep one's team motivated aginst odds. Surena's military victory against an overwhelming Roman Army despite being massively outnumbered is a testament.

It is essential to allocate timeslots for study and innovation. This should involve knowledge sharing, identification of problems that require radically new solutions and brainstorming with team members of varied experiences and skills. The study and knowledge sharing session should involve refreshing fundamentals. People become application oriented with time and most solutions to problems in hand come from solid knowledge of fundamentals. As a practice, I dedicate 90 minutes every Friday to brainstorming with team, where each member discusses his problems in hand, his learnings and actions, other team members discuss the causes of the problems from various points of view leading to a hypothesis and a probable or patentable work around.

The best way to keep a team motivated without internal conflicts as a leader is to make the team members inter-dependent and make every member including the junior most member feel important and respected. This is a primary factor that drives collaboration. Records of military histories reveal that the greatest generals were those who respected and cared for every soldier under their command and who led from the front. Such units had the best cohesion! In my professional experience, I filed 15 patent applications and my co-inventors range from entry level engineers to senior directors. Never under-estimate a junior member's capability. The best value addition to some of my patents came from junior most members. They became my lieutenants.