Lessons on Innovation From Microsoft

[December 2004 - Fast Company] There are plenty of internal reasons why Microsoft's record of innovation is so lackluster. Not to mince words, Bill Gates's researchers have placed a bunch of expensive bets on technologies that haven't panned out. But the company's failure also points to three much bigger lessons about innovation. More

Brattleboro Reformer - Headlines

[10 December 2004 - Brattleboro Reformer] The key to understanding how Vermont can compete and grow in a global marketplace might be found in the storefronts, galleries and people of downtown. And more than 75 people from around the state came to Bellows Falls on Thursday to get a first-hand look. More

First Creative Economy Conference Reaches Out to Regional Creative Community

[8 December 2004 - Innovation Philadelphia] "The creative economy is based on ideas that are generated by human capital," said Richard A. Bendis, president and CEO of Innovation Philadelphia before a room of 300 attendees at its first Creative Economy Conference in December. "The creative economy generates $44 billion in revenue a year .... This is an important sector of the Greater Philadelphia Region that needs to be cultivated." ... Carol Coletta, president of Coletta and Company, gave a comprehensive overview of the findings of the Innovation Philadelphia-commissioned report, "Young and the Restless: How Philadelphia Competes for Talent." She described how the young and the restless - those in the 25 to 34 age category with four-year degrees - are an HR director’s dream. "They are adaptable, flexible, productive and reasonably paid." But she tempered this with the warning, "they are also the most mobile - and tend to move the furthest." More

Creativity After the Election

[December 2004 - Applied Imagination E-news - Creative Education Foundation] The United States campaign season and election that ended last month did not end the division of thought and ideas that exists in this country. There are roughly 60 million people on each side -- many of whom say about the other 60 million people -- "I don't understand how 'those people' think, feel, vote, act and believe how they do." Many of you in the creativity world have expressed a desire to see more of a direct impact from applied imagination effecting a new kind of politics, community and policy. There are several ways to begin translating your hopes for creativity to transform the world:

1. Plan now to participate in CPSI 2005 where you will find a featured, in-depth Immersion program on creative communities and cities, as well as a keynote and Extending breakout sessions. This theme will include topics such as creative class, creative communities, creative peace, imagination and politics, etc.


2. Tell us what you are doing with creativity to transform your community. Share how you promote creative communities where you live. Respond to this story in our Applied Imagination blog by clicking "Post a Comment" below.


3. Read the Memphis Manifesto and then work locally to get it adopted in your own city.


4. Check out the Creative America initiative -- whose goal is to inspire and train creative professionals to run for local office in 2006 and beyond. "We want creative professionals to stand up for creativity as a national value and priority."


5. Create a CEF Affiliate in your community to build a local network of people to help you accomplish these mutual goals of promoting the value of creativity and applied imagination.

What are you doing with creativity to transform your community? Click "Post a Comment" below and tell us about!

The 6 Myths Of Creativity

[December 2004 - Fast Company] Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers? Teresa Amabile has been grappling with those questions for nearly 30 years. Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top B-school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity, is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation. [Editor's Note: Amabile is a also a member of the Creative Education Foundation's Journal of Creative Behavior editorial board.] Eight years ago, Amabile took her research to a daring new level. Working with a team of PhDs, graduate students, and managers from various companies, she collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn't tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email, about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. She then coded the emails for creativity by looking for moments when people struggled with a problem or came up with a new idea. "The diary study was designed to look at creativity in the wild," she says. "We wanted to crawl inside people's heads and understand the features of their work environment as well as the experiences and thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs." Amabile and her team are still combing through the results. But this groundbreaking study is already overturning some long-held beliefs about innovation in the workplace. In an interview with Fast Company , she busted six cherished myths about creativity. (If you want to quash creativity in your organization, just continue to embrace them.) Here they are, in her own words. More

Scientists track footprints of thoughts

[29 November 2004 - ABC News Online] Australian scientists have discovered a way to track the electronic footpath of a single thought travelling through the human brain. The discovery has implications for everything from education to planning the safest way to undertake brain surgery. The latest developments in scanning techniques allow brain experts to track responses in the brain from particular movements and thoughts, in real time. "If we ask them to read a sentence we can actually look at them processing a single sentence. In other words we can look at the footprint of a single thought," Professor Keith Thulborn, from Chicago's Centre for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, said. More