I’m pleased to report that my new e-book, Creativity Hacks: Shortcuts to Help You to Crush Your Challenges & Live a Kick-Ass Life, is now available. What does this have to do with mind mapping and visual thinking? Plenty!

As some of you may know, I am the founder and editor of InnovationTools.com, the world’s largest innovation website. I have just launched a new creativity survey that I thought would be of interest to you.

How are you utilizing mind mapping software to innovate – to envision and develop the new products, services and business s that will power future growth within your firm?

Tony Buzan, the inventor of mind mapping, has spent a large part of his life analyzing how the brain works, and how to visually transfer one’s ideas to paper or screen. Most people realize that mind maps are useful for brainstorming – for quickly capturing ideas as they occur. But few people truly understand the immense power of this technique as a creative problem-solving tool.

Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of developing a mind map, you may come face to face with a mental block that prevents you from thinking through the problem, challenge or situation any further. When this happens, there are a number of techniques that you can use to smash through these mental barriers and re-energize your thinking and fresh, creative directions.

Last week, I was fortunate enough to have a guest post published in LifeDev.net, one of the top personal productivity blogs on the web. This article explains how mind mapping software can help you to increase your creativity.

Mind mapping software acts like a prism, separating a major task or challenge into its component parts and enabling you to see the relationships between them, so you can more effectively develop creative solutions to address it.

Join marketing guru Roger C. Parker on September 5, 2008 as he interviews me on tools and technologies that can be used to enhance your productivity and creativity.