Sometimes it's the smallest ideas that are the most inspiring. I came across this clever trick to ditch the pegboard and keep things organized; no word yet on whether it will induce pacman themed nightmares. Discovered on Reddit, original credit to Lifehacker.
Here's a really excellent artist who blurs the distinctions between engineering, art, and philosophy. Theo Jensen has set out to create "life" from silicon and PVC, creating ambulatory works of art that react to stimuli and can move to evade danger. Irrespective of Jensen's philosophical argument, the engineering (and art) in his work is certainly beautiful. Check out his work on the BBC [link] and a related TED talk [link].
A post on Forbes caught my eye this morning. The rant against armchair quarterbacks aside, it highlights an important issue associated with managing organizational innovation. In particular, companies need to cultivate new and potentially radical ideas while also selecting, evaluating, and implementing the most promising leads. How can managers balance "letting a hundred flowers bloom" with the time and resources required to care for those hundred flowers? Here are the key lines:
No organization, not even Google, has enough time, money, and resources to invest in every good innovation. You must choose, and focus on the best opportunities only. True, you might miss a big one completely. But at least you won’t stumble over and trash several high-potential innovations within your grasp because you were distracted by dozens of average innovations.
Successful innovation strategy is the process by which promising ideas are cultivated and implemented. Organizational slack (a technical term for the money that Google can throw at innovation) doesn't necessarily exempt high-performing companies from this tension, it just allows them to make "little" $100m mistakes here and their as they try out their ideas.
This blog is an experiment. It's purpose is simple: to capture and share some small corner of the creative world. Creative thought and and human ingenuity are amazing phenomena, capable of producing anything from sublime beauty to the invisible and incremental innovations that shape our daily lives. Moreover, we as individuals seldom stop to recognize or analyze our own creative behaviors, despite the potential empowerment and happiness that doing so may provide. While there's no shortage of talented scholars devoted to understanding the impact and existence of creativity, I hope that through this blog I might simply participate in that conversation, share what I learn with those who care, and (most importantly) document my own exploration through a new and exciting place.