Creativity

The secret sauce is “socialstructing.”

I gave a talk at the Canadian Marketing Association in Toronto last week. Leaving the hall, I fell into step with a young marketer. She seemed stressed. “How are you doing?” I asked. “I liked your talk,” she said, “but it’s hard. Everyone wants to be innovative but no one wants to make a mistake.” […]

Why gamble on untested strategies when you could quickly apply an approach that’s already been proven elsewhere?

Oppositional goals can actually increase creativity.

Do highly creative ads really inspire people to buy products? Studies have found that creative messages get more attention and lead to positive attitudes...

Believe it or not, Pixar was once a scrappy startup. The multi-billion dollar juggernaut with a near-perfect record of churning out hit after hit today was once “a bunch of guys going on their gut” according to Andrew Stanton, a co-founding filmmaker with the company whose credits include writing and directing Wall E and Finding […]

Reading about the future can help you invent it.

You need the right state of mind.

If you want creativity, you need to encourage it, and allow time for it to percolate. That was the focus of this year’s Front End of Innovation conference in Boston. Steve Johnson, New Media professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, talked about the importance of creating a “hunch-friendly environment.” That is, give your employees […]

In business lore, the eureka moment overshadows the more important matter of how an invention reaches the marketplace, says author Sir Harold Evans.

Whenever I see a business magazine glow about design thinking, as BusinessWeek has done recently with this special report, and which Harvard Business...

The composer and conductor on responding to the world through music and the struggle to always produce genuinely new, original works.

Ai Weiwei is a multimedia artist and provocateur whose work has frequently challenged the Chinese government. His overtly political tweets and social activism (including his boycott of the Beijing Olympics after helping design its famed Bird’s Nest stadium) may have led to an 81-day detention last year—though the official charge was tax evasion. Still, he […]

It’s time to make a choice.

Managers will have to choose.

Most executives have a big, hairy, audacious goal. They write vision statements, formalize procedures, and develop complicated incentive programs--all...

Conference designer Richard Saul Wurman describes his approach to assembling a memorable and inspirational gathering.

I’m worried that the discussion about innovation is losing its vitality and that a handful of beliefs are becoming dangerous dogmas. Two that worry me the most are: Innovation and design should be user-centered — i.e., users are the first and foremost source of insights. Innovation processes should, therefore, start from observation of mainstream or […]

Just look at what Google and Groupon have done to boost productivity.

Dean Koontz is one of the world's most prolific and best-selling writers, with more than 120 novels to his name. During a difficult childhood, books were...