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To come up with truly creative products and unique ideas, great business leaders need to be independent thinkers. Our brains are wired to recycle ideas we’ve already heard from others, but you can learn to think independently, or to come up with novel ideas, with a few easy psychological tips and tools.

Let's start with an exercise: Take a blank piece of paper and draw an animal from an alien planet.

If you're like most people, then what you’ve drawn looks wacky, but vaguely familiar. It's probably somewhat symmetric, and it likely has some combination of arms, legs, ears, eyes, or noses. In other words, it looks like a distorted version of animals on Earth.

"Everything you think is influenced by years of experience and cultural upbringing," says Art Markman, a cognitive psychologist at University of Texas at Austin and author of Smart Thinking (Perigee Trade, 2012). "Your natural tendency is to pull a known solution from your memory."

Independent thinking requires you to break that mold. Try these three strategies to prompt your brain to think more independently:

1. Place a lot of constraints on the problem. 
Paradoxically, open-ended problems are the enemy of independent thinking. "If you don't have constraints, the first things you'll come up with are the most accessible memories," Markman says. "They'll be really similar to what others have done before."

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/227239#ixzz2YDzPKLCt