Post(s) tagged with "creativity"

The certain path to feeling creative is to find a constituency more ignorant than you and poised to benefit from your idea.

Ronald Burt, Structural Holes and Good Ideas

1 May 2013 6 Permalink
ronald burtcreativitysturctural holescreativity runs downhill
Le vide [emptiness; structural holes] has a huge function in organizations.. […] Shock comes when different things meet. It’s the interface that’s interesting. […] If you don’t leave le vide, you have no unexpected things, no creation. There are two types of management. You can try to design for everything, or you can leave le vide and say, ‘I don’t know either; what do you think?’

René Fourtou

A predisposition toward leaving room for chance, building organizations to have structutral holes so that the unexpected can happen, a place where there are not always ready-made answers shared by everyone, an acceptance of the heterogeneous and unorthodox, and no official future.

I might paraphrase around Fourtou’s French, and say, 

There are two kinds of management. You can try to design for everything, or you can leave room for surprise. Room enough to say, ‘I don’t know either; what do you think?’

1 May 2013 8 Permalink
le viderené fourtouquotationsstructural holesdiversitycreativityleaving room for innovation

Socialogy: Interview with Jennifer Magnolfi

Read More

19 March 2013 6 Permalink
jennifer magnolficoworkingzappostony hsieharchitectureworkspaceinnovationcreativitysocialogy
wildcat2030: Can Creativity be Automated? Computer algorithms have started to write news stories, compose music, and pick hits. - In 2004, New Zealander Ben Novak was just a guy with a couple of guitars and distant dreams of becoming a pop star. A year later one of Novak’s songs, Turn Your Car Around, had invaded Europe’s radio stations, becoming a top-10 hit. Novak had to beat long odds to get discovered. The process record labels use to find new talent—A&R, for “artists and repertoire”—is fickle and hard to explain; it rarely admits unknowns like him. So Novak got into the music business through a back door that had been opened not by a human, but by an algorithm tasked with finding hit songs. It’s widely accepted that creativity can’t be copied by machines. Reinforcing these assumptions are hundreds of books and studies that have attempted to explain creativity as the product of mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain. Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people are from CPUs. But now we’re learning that for some creative work, that simply isn’t true. Complex algorithms are moving into creative fields—even those as nebulous as music A&R—and proving that in some of these pursuits, humans can be displaced. (via Can Creativity be Automated? - Technology Review)

wildcat2030:

Can Creativity be Automated?

Computer algorithms have started to write news stories, compose music, and pick hits.

-

In 2004, New Zealander Ben Novak was just a guy with a couple of guitars and distant dreams of becoming a pop star. A year later one of Novak’s songs, Turn Your Car Around, had invaded Europe’s radio stations, becoming a top-10 hit. Novak had to beat long odds to get discovered. The process record labels use to find new talent—A&R, for “artists and repertoire”—is fickle and hard to explain; it rarely admits unknowns like him. So Novak got into the music business through a back door that had been opened not by a human, but by an algorithm tasked with finding hit songs. It’s widely accepted that creativity can’t be copied by machines. Reinforcing these assumptions are hundreds of books and studies that have attempted to explain creativity as the product of mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain. Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people are from CPUs. But now we’re learning that for some creative work, that simply isn’t true. Complex algorithms are moving into creative fields—even those as nebulous as music A&R—and proving that in some of these pursuits, humans can be displaced. (via Can Creativity be Automated? - Technology Review)

27 July 2012 52 wildcat2030 Permalink
creativityalgorithmic creativity

paulpedrazzi:

John Cleese - a lecture on Creativity (by janalleman)

10 June 2012 15 paulpedrazzi Permalink
john cleesecreativity
History will probably laugh at our time’s attempt to impose a mentality of industrial production upon creative work.

iDoneThis, The Slow Web Movement

17 April 2012 6 Permalink
slow webslowcreativity

Great inventors engage in divergent or “wrong” thinking, which allows them to explore the full realm of possibilities for a solution - no matter how silly or far-fetched. They’re not necessarily concerned with the most logical solution, and certainly not with one that draws on “conventional wisdom.” As modern-day inventor Sir James Dyson puts it:

We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way… When I was doing my vacuum cleaner, I started out trying a conventionally shaped cyclone, the kind you see in textbooks. But we couldn’t separate the carpet fluff and dog hairs and strands of cotton in those cyclones. It formed a ball inside the cleaner or shot out the exit and got into the motor. I tried all sorts of shapes. Nothing worked. So then I thought I’d try the wrong shape, the opposite of conical. And it worked.

Jocelyn Glei, citing James Dyson in What It Takes To Innovate: Wrong-Thinking, Tinkering & Intuiting via The 99 Percent

Source: the99percent.com

4 April 2012 92 Permalink
wrong-thinkinginventioninnovationcreativity
Of course, the only solution to the problem of human innovation is more innovation. After a resource is exhausted, we are forced to exploit a new resource, if only to sustain our craving for growth…But the escape is only temporary, as every innovation eventually leads to new shortages. We clear-cut forests, and so we turn to oil; once we exhaust our fossil fuel reserves, we’ll start driving electric cars, at least until we run out of lithium. Although human creativity has generated a seemingly impossible amount of economic growth, it has also inspired the innovations that allow the growth to continue. So here’s the paradox: creativity is the only solution to the very problem of creativity.

The Cost of Creativity | Wired Science (via curiositycounts)

28 March 2012 97 curiositycounts Permalink
innovationcreativity

CEOs and Creativity

18 March 2012 4 Permalink
creativityinnovation
Why Ditching The Office Could Help You Be More Creative | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation ⇢

Ariel Schwartz reports on new research, suggesting that working in a moderately noisy environment — like a coworking space or a café— can lead to a low level of distraction, a state that prompts abstract thinking. So, if you want to do some creative thinking, move to a slightly noisier corner of the office.

15 March 2012 15 Permalink
coworkingcreativityinnovation
1 2 3 →

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

Working on longer format projects, Sign up for the newsletter.

GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.