Innovation Anxiety
Innovating is hard work. Perhaps the most difficult aspect is dealing with the anxiety that comes with following a systematic innovation method. The process forces innovators to start with uncomfortable, abstract concepts that seem silly and worthless. These are called preinventive concepts because they occur right before the moment of innovating. Successful innovators learn how to deal with and control the anxiety at this critical moment of invention. But there is a catch: some are better at it than others. Fortunately, there is a way to determine if you are more or less anxiety-ridden from these effects.
Anxiety is a natural part of the SOLUTION-TO-PROBLEM approach. What causes it? Finke, Ward, and Smith describe it in their classic book, Creative Cognition. Once you have transformed an existing situation (product, service, etc), it becomes a hypothetical solution to a yet-to-be-found problem. The trick to great innovation is to construct preinventive structures that have these properties: