#121 - Dr. Shama Rahman, CEO of NeuroCreate - On how technology can give us all the advantage of being creative

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all feel 'in our zone' more quickly at work. My guest is Dr. Shama Rahman, CEO of NeuroCreate.

Dr. Shama Rahman is an accomplished musician, vocalist, songwriter, with a PhD in philosophy, neuroscience and complexity. In December 2017, she founded Neurocreate – a startup at the junction of AI, Neuroscience and cognition. It was founded around the vision that peak performance is not just for highly trained elites, but within reach for all of us.

It’s on a mission to create a positive and symbiotic relationship with technology which enables us to be more mentally productive, creative, and flexible.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Shama to my podcast. I think we can all agree that soft skills such as creativity and problem-solving are becoming more and more important today. That’s a blessing if those skills come natural to you – but what if they don’t? As such, we explore how technology can help and give us all that advantage. We discuss the journey from the moment that sparked the idea for this innovation, and the lessons learned along the way.

Here are some of her quotes:

We are trying to get you to this peak performance mental state code flow, but by training you to think more creatively. We're doing this using a mixture of AI, because of its ability to be interactive, and obviously, the pattern detection that it has, but in a very symbiotic design that actually encompasses the neuroscience of creativity.

I don't think anybody is not creative. I think everybody's creative. I think it's just a skill. Or another way of putting it: it's a muscle that you use. It's all like practices, tools, techniques. And so all we're doing is we're digitizing things that people are doing already, but in a way where the AI allows you to look at things beyond your normal perspectives

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How real value can be created by removing people’s blind spots and unconscious biases.
2. Why 70% of innovation fails because we’re prototyping the wrong thing – we’re barking down the wrong tree
3. That you can create compelling advantage – advantage people talk about by going specific and niche, i.e., knowing exactly who it's for, and what it’s for.