Group items tagged

"Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating." John Cleese talks about research surrounding creativity, and the factors to consider to facilitate being creative.

IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success. Fewer than half of CEOs Successfully Handling Growing Complexity; Diverging priorities in Asia, North America, and Europe.

At GeekDad we are always interested in the intersection where technology supports our children's learning and creativity. So, this new project that is taking

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

Great quote: "Creativity comes from being willing and able to look past the first idea or concept that comes into our heads."

In the digital age, we increasingly use written language in place of face to face chat or phone calls. But the advantages email, chat, and text give us in speed come with limitations in communicating emotional tone. Enter emoticons and emojis. Not just a playful supplement to language, these new tools allow for complexity in tone and emotion never before possible in written language, as well as provide new opportunities for creative expression. Rapidly spreading throughout culture, emoticons and emojis fill a void in written language that few realized we so desperately needed.

crowdSPRING's blog about design, digital creativity, business strategy and more.

Advertising industry information from Adweek. Read inside stories on advertising, creative, and client - agency relationships.

Interesting on many levels. First is the fact that this entire agency works on big projects in a sort of competition. Second is that a smaller group of employees used email to self-organize a critique (however sophomoric) of the teams of creatives. Third is the danger that one person's lack of digital fluency (he hit the wrong button), or perhaps the organization's lack of digital fluency (could they have been having these discussions on a less-private medium than email?) presented. The fourth is the fact that a powerful/dangerous/fortuitous sort of serendipity emerged. 

The joke was intended to be absurd, but the absurdity presumed a lack of seriousness in the whole matter. It was an attempt at post-serious humor - but most people with common sense agree that the struggles of Tibet still deserve respect and seriousness. The joke is on anyone who really cares. It came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overprivileged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as "douchebags") would come up with.

The customer-centered company needs to make its products interactive, train its people for co-creative dialogue, redesign its physical places for two-way interactions, and open up the architecture of its digital sites to other processes and content that the company doesn't control. Nike puts a sensor in its shoes that lets runners track their runs and has a web platform where exchange data with others. Starbucks encourages a dialogue across all its stakeholders through the highly popular mystarbucksidea.com website. 3M invites its B2B customersto co-create new products with its R&D people live in their corporate labs. Apple invites third parties to develop new applications for its iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Companies are generally unprepared for this transformation to experience co-creation. Most product development groups continue to design non-interactive products. Company people in call centers and company stores still generally follow company narratives. Most corporate IT departments and suppliers are trained in one-way project-management techniques incompatible with true engagement-platform development. Herein lies the transformational challenge customer experience managers will face as they become customer-experience co-creators.

More and more executives are experimenting with open innovation initiatives. Stefan Lindegaard outlines some potential knock-on effects-both good and bad.