1. BRAINSPARKER:
Brainsparker is a sensational app that can provide you your daily shot of inspiration. It is an online academy with a vast amount of training courses on creativity, innovation, and leadership. It’s available for iOS.
2. GOOGLE KEEP:
Keeping your thoughts organized is a very big part of strategic and structured innovation. Google Keep is the #1 note-taking app that lets you take notes, make checklists, and organize them with tags and colors galore. It’s available for iOS, Android, and on the web.
3. MICROSOFT TO-DO:
Keeping a fluent, coherent chain of your tasks for the day is paramount to innovation. Microsoft To-Do is a stellar, well-designed app that lets you set and track tasks in any specific order you want. It also syncs across platforms so you can always be on top of your day. It’s available for iOS, Android, and Windows.
4. LOOP HABIT TRACKER:
One of the biggest tenets of innovation, as with all things, is consistency. This can’t be a one-time deal. You need to do this everyday, without fail, to truly excel at it. Loop is a great, open-source app lets you set habits and make checkboxes and put them as widgets on your home screen to track your chain of habits related to innovation. You can set any appropriate habits you want, such as ‘Think of 3 new ideas a day’ or ‘Do 2 innovation exercises everyday’. It’s only available for Android at the moment, but a similar app for iOS is Habit Hub.
5. TED TALKS:
TED stands for ‘Technology, Engineering, and Design’. It is an organization that produces talks from expert speakers mainly on these three topics, but also others such as education, science, social change, creativity, and so on. The app is available on iOS and Android, and the talks are also available on their website and their YouTube channel. Some of our favorite talks that you can get started with are, Julie Burstein’s ‘4 lessons in creativity’, Charles Leadbeater’s ‘The era of open innovation’, and, for something relevant to these times, Bill Gates’s ‘How the pandemic will shape the near future’.
6. COFFITIVITY:
And finally, we all know staying focused and avoiding distractions while working can be hard, especially in absolute silence when everything seems so flat and boring. But then playing music can be distracting too. So what can you do?! That’s where Coffitivity comes in. It pipes in soothing ambient sounds such as the sounds of a café or a big city. These sounds help you feel fresh and relaxed and help keep you focused, enabling you to do deep work like never before. The app is available on iOS, Mac OS, and is on the web.
Check out these apps and let us know which one is your favorite in the comments below! Until then, stay ‘appy’!