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Really like this, have experienced it myself.
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Part of your mission is teaching “creative confidence.” What does that mean and how do you do that?

It’s pretty amazing to watch. Students come in and say, “Oh I’m not creative.” That just makes my skin crawl. I really think everybody is creative. There are just some blocks in the way. Lots of CEOs, when I go in their office they say, “Geez, you’re so creative and I’m not a creative person.” It’s not that I’m creative and they’re not. I need to unlock that. The best way to unlock that is to give them creative confidence. Sometimes it’s getting them to be able to stand up and draw stick figures. Sometimes it has to do with getting them to make their strategic plan visual. But the main thing is you have to give them an experience. Creative confidence comes from us teaching organizations, individuals, CEOs, students, or whoever, a methodology. We call it “design thinking” but it’s really an innovation methodology. It’s a little prescribed, but that makes them feel more comfortable because they have this kind of step-by-step approach. It takes them down the path of doing a project and then there’s this moment where they realize that they’ve come up with ideas a lot better than what they would have come up with using their normal method. All they have to do is be mindful of that methodology and continually improve it.
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ideo david_kelley creativity ideas design_thinking

Fascinating talk by Matt Ridley at Ted Global: how exchange - a kind of sexual exchange or promiscuity - helps ideas to spread, and in turn, how the spread of ideas turbo-charges development.

ted_conference matt_ridley economic_development ideas

"The business model – which is another way of saying the underlying purpose – of just about everything is changing right now, and that includes the university and the newspaper."

bob_massie newspapers ideas harvard business_model

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This year’s HBR List includes ideas that we think are more useful than fanciful, more immediately practicable than speculative. Although we began compiling and winnowing contenders many months ago, we nonetheless did our best to anticipate the context in which you now read them. Thus some of the articles you’ll find here comment directly on the economic crisis, but most of them address other matters that business leaders must contend with: strategic decision making, tapping new markets, finding and keeping top talent, harnessing network effects, dealing with disruptive technologies and business models.
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harvard_business innovation ideas 2009

File this under "great idea!" Get printable magnetic sheets, print out your design elements, and move them around on a magnetic whiteboard.

adaptive_path ideas design reference

Read the entry, "What's 'authentic'?," by Andrew Taylor, but then read the first comment that follows, by Bill Ivey. Taylor, writing from an arts manager perspective, observes: "Since arts organizations are often perceived (or perceive themselves) as havens of authentic expression, it might be worth a moment to define, exactly, what that means." Ivey, donning his "folklorist" hat, contrasts the "authentic" barn-raising, say, with the construction of a pre-fab barn -- or "authentic" blue jeans and their history of being workwear, with the "brand" of "authentic" designer jeans. Apples & oranges, and the oranges, it seems, are watery -- or "thin," as Ivey puts it: they offer "the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few."

authenticity branding culture culture_industry folklore ideas ideology marketing

First time I've tagged something under "gunpowder," but Cai Guo Qiang's art deserves its own tag and niche. I love this guy's work (although, admittedly, I haven't had a chance to see it in person, even though it was displayed at the Seattle Art Museum). Just to give an idea of this man's thinking:
"Gunpowder is a spontaneous, unpredictable and uncontrollable medium. The more you learn to control it, the more obsessed you become with the material. It is like making love with your husband or wife. The outcome is unpredictable and the same results are never guaranteed. Furthermore, in using gunpowder I can explore all my concerns: the relation to notions of spirituality as well as an interest in spectacle and entertainment, and the transformation of certain energies—such as violent explosions—into beauty and a kind of poetry. An artist should be like an alchemist using poison against poison, which is very much a philosophy from Chinese medicine. Turning something bad into something good…countering the force. It’s the whole idea of the alchemist, using dirt, dust, and getting gold out of it. From gunpowder, from its very essence, you can see so much of the power of the universe—how we came to be. You can express these grand ideas about the cosmos."

This is philosophy and art, not just tired old ideology and art. Brilliant stuff, truly.

On the Olympics -- a salient topic for us, in BC, given that next-door Vancouver will host the Winter Games in 2010 -- Cai Guo Qiang notes:
"The Olympics combine the entire country’s efforts, and can do a lot of previously unimaginable things. You can display your work in front of an audience of billions, but at the same time it can feel like you’re making the work for yourself. Through this event, one can contemplate and better understand what “Chinese culture” is. One needs to think about the past, present, and future of China and its relationship with the world."

That makes me think it's the most significant statement yet (for the non-athlete) on the Olympics: time to step

art cai_guo_qiang gunpowder ideas sculpture

I've had this open in a browser tab for days, wanting to bookmark it, but hesitating because I found it impossible to describe, tag, or in any way categorize. So, let's just say it's "wow" and one of the best recaps-cum-predictions amongst the blogs. Read it.

architecture cities cloud_computing creatives economics ideas predictions privacy reference wow

ideas socialtheory theobald