How 3M got its creative juices flowing again - Marc Gunther , CNN

3M is everywhere. That's the point George Buckley, the chairman and CEO of 3M, is trying to make as he talks about his favorite subject, inventing things. Last year, he says, "even in the worst economic times in memory, we released over 1,000 new products." As if on cue, Buckley's new iPhone rings, showing a photo of his daughter. "Daddy's in a meeting," he says, and hangs up. "I'm told there's some 3M inside that phone," I say. Buckley replies, "There's lots of 3M inside." He can't say exactly what 3M (MMM, Fortune 500) gadget is in the iPhone; Apple's (AAPL, Fortune 500) skittish about such things. But point well made: 3M is everywhere. Apple and many others couldn't do what they do without 3M

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Busyness Is the Enemy of Creativity - John Cleese:YouTube

John Cleese contends that the process he used to dream up Monty Python hilarity isn’t all that different from the one employees across the globe use to find innovative and improved ways of doing business. And the enemy of this process, Cleese concludes, is ordinary busy-ness. To keep the daily grind at bay you need a tortoise enclosure for your mind. What on earth is he talking about? Check out this engaging and humorous 10-minute video to find out.

The Origins of Good Ideas - An Extract from Steven Johnson's New Book "Where Good Ideas Come From"

In the year following the 2004 tsunami, the Indonesian city of Meulaboh received eight neonatal incubators from international relief organizations. Several years later, when an MIT fellow named Timothy Prestero visited the local hospital, all eight were out of order, the victim of power surges and tropical humidity, along with the hospital staff's inability to read the English repair manual. Mr. Prestero and the organization he cofounded, Design That Matters, had been working for several years on a more reliable, and less expensive, incubator for the developing world. In 2008, they introduced a prototype called the NeoNurture. It looked like a streamlined modern incubator, but its guts

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The Magnificence of Failure - Malcolm McLaren, Handheld Learning Conference 2009

A wonderful reflection on learning, the arts and the creative journey by the late Malcolm McLaren.

Getting the Best Out of Your People - Stop Telling Them to Get Outside the Box, Instead Tell Them About The Constraints..

A CEO friend of ours recently complained about the difficulty of keeping creativity alive in his business during this difficult period. He had previously cut back on "discretionary" spending—such as development of new products and marketing plans—in order to survive the Great Recession, and he hasn't yet seen his company's revenues bounce back enough to invest heavily in future growth. We told him he was nuts—that creativity is even more important in times when sales are harder to come by and customers are less loyal. We also told him that two separate research studies (one by Bain, the other by Booz Allen) showed long ago that market share gains made during bad times are more likely to stick than those made during growth periods. Despite our scolding, he still felt he couldn't afford to invest more resources to foster creativity, and simply had to get more from what little resources he had. So, could we help him or not?

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