For those seeking inspiration or a quick burst of knowledge, nothing compares to watching a TED Talk. These speeches come from the world’s most inspirational business people, celebrity personalities and leaders; and each talk imparts a takeaway unique from the others.

No matter if you’re starting your workday, half-way through or finishing for the afternoon – these 5 Ted Talks will give you a refreshing look at how to be innovative in a professional setting.

Here are our favourite picks at Madi.Digital:

Linda Hill: How To Manage For Collective Creativity

“If we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about.”

Linda Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. This incredible and successful businesswoman goes into the secret behind unlocking creativity every day.

Dr Hill has studied the most creative companies in the world. From her studies, she discovered a set of tools to continuously promote good ideas from staff.

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From

We take ideas from other people, people we’ve learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.”

We’ve all experienced it – sometimes a good idea comes from nowhere, other times you feel like you’re in a slump for days or weeks on end. Steven Johnson breaks down the human psyche to discuss if our good ideas are really dependent on a single ‘Eureka’ moment, or if there’s more to how good ideas come about.

Adam Grant: The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

“Original (thinkers) drive creativity and change in the world. They’re the people you want to bet on. And they look nothing like I expected.”

T.E Lawrence famously said that dreamers of the day were dangerous men ‘For they may act their dreams with open eyes’. This TED Talk by Adam Grant carries much of the same rule. The Organizational psychologist studies “original” thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk Mr Grant delves into three surprising habits all original thinkers demonstrate.

Navi Radjou: Creative Problem – Solving In The Face Of Extreme Limits

“When you grow up in a developing country like India, as I did, you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have.”

Formal education is not a sure-fire way to success. Navi Radjou has dedicated himself to the study of jugaad which is non-conventional, frugal innovations, sometimes referred to as “hacks”. He observed how in developing countries people make a living by being extraordinarily innovative or finding a simple work-around which seems to bend the rules of what we perceive as ‘propper’.

Radjou shares three main principles in his TED Talk on how everyone can all do more with less.

Manoush Zomorodi: How Bored Can Lead To Your Most Brilliant Ideas

“It turns out that when you get bored, you ignite a network in your brain called the “default mode.” So our body goes on autopilot while we’re folding the laundry or we’re walking to work, but actually that is when our brain gets really busy.”

Life can happen at 100kmph. When you get caught up in the daily grind it’s difficult to think of quality ideas. In her TED Talk, former journalist Manoush Zomorodi discusses how sometimes the best creative moments occur when you’re bored out of your mind.

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