Innovation Hell: Saving Good Ideas From Premature Death - Visualised | Fast Company

Why is it that so many ideas grow weaker in the process that is theoretically designed to bring them to life? It's a painful but true phenomena (also, a very bad indicator of a company culture, if your goal is to survive and not become yesterday's news). Innovation is the heaven and hell of every brand’s journey. Inspired insight and passion fuel innovation’s potential, while committees have the wonderful legacy of killing potential greatness faster than a roomful of politicians. Or worse, a committee of politicians.

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Creativity Does Not Equal Innovation

Innovation and Creativity are words that are at times used interchangeably in the research and development process, but they have two distinct meanings. While creativity is about coming up with the big idea, innovation is about executing the idea and making it a business success. Do not confuse the two. An organization can certainly have creativity without the right steps to implement innovation.

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Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine: How Creativity Works' Video

It seems like everywhere you turn (on the internet), there's a thought piece, review or Q&A about Jonah Lehrer's new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works." The 30-year-old science writer studied sexy examples of creativity (Bob Dylan) as well as unsexy ones (Swiffer) in his quest to understand that mysterious thing called inspiration, and his work seems to have touched a nerve. Now one of Lehrer's most provocative passages -- a defense of frustration as a necessary phase during problem-solving -- has been transformed into a short movie by animator Flash Rosenberg (side note: great animator name!). Which is great, because who doesn't love big thoughts expressed in drawrings? Rosenberg does the animation equivalent of liveblogging to a narration of Lehrer's words, and as expected, the story of Archimedes in the tub makes for righteous visuals.

Creativity Lessons from Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs - Anne Kreamer - Harvard Business Review

Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America's GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, when it brought us breakthrough innovations like laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the mouse. And that was just from one company's private R&D engine, Xerox's PARC. At the same time, experts fret that our public school system doesn't foster enough creativity in our future workforce. All of which makes it easy to worry that we'll run out of creative leaders producing creative goods. But I think the declinism is overwrought. And that's because some of the best paths to encourage innovation are surprisingly simple.

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How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries | Adam Savage from Mythbusters - Video on TED.com

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.