Is it possible to have a creative bureaucracy?
Creative Bureaucracy - Charles Landry from Mars Horodyski on Vimeo.
Making Innovation Happen
Creative Bureaucracy - Charles Landry from Mars Horodyski on Vimeo.
Two of the world's leading game design experts, Jesse Schell , an academic, and his even younger peer, Seth Priebatsch, an entrepreneur offer a take on game technology and how they see it evolving and how it influences the world in which we live.
From his official bio: "Prior to starting Schell Games in 2004, Jesse Schell was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as on Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for kids.
"Schell is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches classes in Game Design and serves as advisor on several innovative projects. Formerly the Chairman of the International Game Developers Association, he is also the author of the award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses."
Schell Games' latest endeavor: creating a video game based on the box office hit The Mummy.
Two things you'll notice about Seth Priebatsch: One, his infectious, get-you-out-of-your-chair enthusiasm. Two, the inventory of entrepreneurial feats he's managed to accumulate at a remarkably young age. The 21-year-old founded his first startup at age 12, and by age 18, he'd founded another -- PostcardTech, which makes interactive marketing tours for CD-ROM.
Now he's working on SCVNGR, "a massive experiment in building a mobile game together." Backed by Google Ventures, SCVNGR is part game, part game platform. Players play SCVNGR by going places, doing challenges and having fun -- outside of the office, beyond the screen, in the real world. Organizations use SCVNGR by building on the game layer by adding their own challenges to the places they care about.
I like taking the time once in a while to tie different trends together, it just helps me focus on what's really happening now and helps me understand where things might be going. Taken individually there are some very interesting things happening in technology and business but when you link them together a picture starts to emerge that is almost staggering in depth and breadth of change potential. I was reading "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil the other day and a point jumped out at me that I think is extremely important when looking at change, whether you agree with Kurzweil's ideas on singularity or not.
Ever since the romantic poet John Keats accused Newton of trying to unweave the rainbow in his poem Lamia, science and poetry have lost a common tongue. Listen to this wonderful podcast from ABC Radio National's Big Ideas Programmes entitled Weaving the Rainbow: The Poet and The Scientist Speak as two of Australia's leading cultural icons, Barry Jones and Les Murray discuss and share views on how science and arts might regain a shared language for wonder.
The most important thing to understand about America's "crisis of creativity" is that there isn't one. The notion that American business creativity is either at risk or in decline is laughable. Arguments that "Yankee ingenuity" is ebbing into oxymoron are ludicrous. They invite ridicule. So here it comes. Yes, America's economy is awful. But so what? Hard times haven't nicked, dented or damaged this country's creative core competence. To the contrary, they've made more people more interested in being more creative. Spend serious time at research university labs. Or sit in on 10K business plan competitions. Or wander through Silicon Valley incubators and Texas industrial parks. Or listen to top-tier venture capitalists. You'll be impressed. There's no shortage of creativity and ingenuity here. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests the only measurable "creativity crisis" America faces is an embarrassment of riches. We're spoiled for choice.