Tim Brown IDEO Offers His Version Of Where Ideas Come From

Few organizations, Tim Brown says, are set up to allow much creative collaboration, and even those are often afflicted by a culture that mishandles the results. “Too many ideas that get through to the market make it there because somebody senior is the one sponsoring them,” he says, “not because they’re necessarily the best ideas.” Brown looks to “design thinking” as an answer: incorporating designers’ problem-solving and idea-generation methods into a traditional organization, working with—and occasionally against—traditional R&D. The idea is to broaden horizons and instill a more innovative orientation, especially in a period of economic crisis. “In times when we’re scared,” Brown remarks, “we tend to get tunnel vision, don’t we?”

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What We Look for in Founders - A Paul Graham Essay

This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.

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The Three Threats to Creativity - Teresa Amabile - HBS Faculty - Harvard Business Review

Creativity is under threat. It happens whenever and wherever there's a squeeze on the ingredients of creativity, and it's happening in many businesses today. According to the Labor Department's most recent stats, productivity is up. But stretching fewer employees to cover ever more work in our job-starved recovery is no way to run the future. Without the creativity that produces new and valuable ideas, innovation — the successful implementation of new ideas — withers and dies. Creativity depends on the right people working in the right environment. Too often these days, the people come ill-equipped, and their work environments stink. A recent story about the 40th anniversary of Xerox PARC stirred my memories of how the creativity ingredients overflowed at that place,

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"The Web" at 20 - Ben Zimmer, Visual Thesaurus

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau authored the proposal that launched "the World Wide Web," and the English language has never been the same. In my On Language column for The New York Times Magazine this Sunday, I take a look back at the inception of "the Web" and its many linguistic offspring over the years. As a master metaphor for our online age, the gossamer Web has proved remarkably resilient. As I mention in the column, the phrase "world-wide web" (with world-wide properly hyphenated) was not original to Berners-Lee and Cailliau, used in the past to refer to spy rings or other complex global networks.

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How switching off can help you be more creative - and productive - ABC On-Line

If you reading this online at work - in between checking emails, writing a report for your boss or a client and/or monitoring the price of tea in China - you're risking a major drop in productivity. Hopefully the time you're spending away from other tasks will be balanced by learning something new and interesting. But even if it's relevant to your work, switching back and forth between screens can seriously mess with your mind. According to US media and technology writer William Powers "...we're constantly contending with far more tasks than our minds can handle. We find it increasingly hard to concentrate on any one of them for more than a few minutes. It's estimated that unnecessary interruptions and consequent recovery time now eat up an average of 28 per cent of the working day".

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