Evaluation, Rewards, Competition and Contraints -- Their Effects on Creativity - Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile is a well-known creativity researcher, who has focussed on the effects on creativity produced by evaluation, rewards, competition and constraints. I find it very interesting that Dr. Amabile is a professor of business administration (and at Harvard University). Some material from her book, Creativity in Context (1996, Westview Press) is summarized below. According to Amabiles experimental results, evaluation (as, say, good or bad) and rewards have very similar results on creativity. The results depend upon the nature of the task -- is it * Heuristic, where many possibilities must be explored OR * Algorithmic, where the task is primarily a linear series of steps, where the order is clear.

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Data, information, knowledge, wisdom - visualized! Information Is Beautiful |

Just a think-piece really.

(I was recently visiting the office of the awesome design website Swiss Miss. Over snacks, they asked me to christen their “lunch guest wall” with a scribble. Caught in the headlights and feeling the pressure to be clever and impressive, my mind, of course, went blank. Spotless white. All I had was a noodle in my notepad about the increasing organisational structure of information and how it might relate to visualization. It had been a *long* flight to NY.)

I got kinda stuck with it. So I wanted to open it up and see what you thought.

This is by no means original thought. This structure has been around for a while. (In fact does anyone knows who first came up with it?). The only new thing is relating it to visuals. And giving it a nice font.

One interesting thing. If you visualise information without designing it, you often end up with a mush or a meaningless thicket. So if you can only really ‘design’ information, rather than visualize it, then maybe the term ‘information visualization’ is a bit of a misnomer?

Anyway, how does it look to you? Does it seem logical? Truthful? Do the definitions ring true? What could be the word for the visual depiction of wisdom? Does greater verticality imply greater meaning? Or can errors creep in?

Look forward to your ideas, feedback and corrections!

Link to Information Is Beautiful Blog

Wanted: The Next Great Management Idea - Management Innovation Exchange

Here’s a chance for the world’s MBA students to put their expensive education to work and maybe even make a few bucks in the process. The Management Innovation Exchange, an project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century, and HCL Technologies, a global IT services provider, are offering more than $50,000 in prizes for the best new game-changing management ideas. The HCL MBA M-Prize competition is open to all current graduate business school students and will honor “the best new idea for making organizations more adaptable, more innovative, more inspiring, and more socially accountable.”

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Creativity in Organizations - How can creativity become a prime contributor to the strategic objective of the organization? - Ralph Kerle

This article provides an historical overview over the last 100 years of the development and affects of applied creative thinking in organizations and asks the question why creativity has not been better understood as an organisational or business process; analysizes the findings of a 2008 major national research project entitled ‘Is Australian management creative and innovative?” in the context of contemporary creative practice in organisations and offers a benchmarking system – the Management Innovation Index™ as a way for organizations to model their creative ecology and over time, using the organisation’s key measures for success, to educate specifically to improve management innovation practice and productivity and ultimately to predict the outcomes of the organization’s creativity and innovation behaviours.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Storytelling - BBC

Here is a very neat set of guides for digital storytelling from the BBC. They are written for those helping others to make digital stories but most of the guidance is still relevant if you're making your own story.

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