Creativity in Research: Cultivate Clarity, Be Innovative, and Make Progress in your Research Journey Paperback – Import, 1 August 2019

This is not really a book about how to be creative in research. It barely touches creativity techniques. It's more about managing emotions and peripheral problems while doing PhD. Probably you can find much of the advice in other books written for graduate students. Chapter 4 is a good one, which comes close to creativity methods. In summary, if you are working on your PhD topic, don't expect the book to do much for you because it's far from giving you advice on how to be innovative in your subject area, in particular, if you're in science or applied science.

I highly recommend this book. I like it so much that after I read it, I decided to organize a "book club" focused on it, over a semester, for my graduate students. The book finds that sweet spot of being easy to read but full of interesting and thought-provoking insight. Its provides scores of useful pointers for researchers, and does a nice job of noting how its points are relevant for researchers at many stages (though I think it maybe slightly more tuned to earlier-career researchers). Its overall organization makes its seven "big ideas" fairly easy to grasp and remember, and its visuals do a great job of encapsulating take-away points. Adding to this general usefulness and readability, one of my favorite aspects of the book its is substantial list of exercises at the end of every chapter. I used a number of them and found them refreshing and quite helpful. And I especially look forward to engaging in some of these activities with my students -- e.g., I'm very curious what ideas are going to come from throwing the question "How would this problem be solved in a Disney movie?" at a research conundrum. Who knows what may happen? And that's the point!

Several random pages falling out as I try to read. If I didn’t need it for a class this semester, I’d return it.