To Innovate, Create "Hunch-Friendly" Environments - HBR

If you want creativity, you need to encourage it, and allow time for it to percolate. That was the focus of this year's Front End of Innovation conference in Boston. Steve Johnson, New Media professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, talked about the importance of creating a "hunch-friendly environment." That is, give your employees the latitude to explore their ideas and you'll be amazed what they come up with. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, had 10 years of latitude to conceive of the Internet. Researchers from MIT, who were interested in space exploration were given untold amounts of time to track signals from Sputnick, and with that time they changed the future of the world. Their experiments led to current day global positioning systems.

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What Insights Do Animals and Ancient Creativity Offer - Barbara J. King

Earlier this week, it was announced that as possibly as long ago as 40,000 years, a pair of birds was painted in red ochre on a rock overhang in northern Australia. The images speak directly to a human fascination with animals expressed far back in time. The focus on animals in this art is fairly unsurprising. Judging from the heretofore earliest-known art from caves or rocks of Australia, Africa, and Europe, the early human mind was preoccupied with all sorts of birds and mammals. Less predictable perhaps is the type of bird chosen for depiction in Australia. It has been identified as the genus Genyornis—a supersized (“megafauna”) bird that went extinct about 40,000 years ago.

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Creative Technologist – Division of labor vs the return of the generalist? - Anders Wahlquist - CATScan - Creativity Online

What happens to roles as a small technology organisation evolves and grows from B-Reel co-founder Anders Wahlquist Starting B-Reel 11 years ago, we three founders had clear roles. Petter [Westlund, left]: designer, programmer, motion artist; swiss army knife in all things digital production. Pelle [Nilsson, center]: producer, director. Swiss army knife in all things TV and TVC production. Anders [Wahlquist, right]: business / key account. Swiss army knife all things Sales / HR / Business / legal / admin. Like a cell structure B-Reel has since developed organically looking for people beeing very allroundish. Generalists. Basically we have been happy with that. People overlap. Starting projects, we brought the whole team to the brief and collected ideas from all angles. Team effort.

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Its True - Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia - BBC News'

Artist Salvador Dali is known for his surreal paintings and eccentric personalit. Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works. Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought. It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to "think outside the box", say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute. In some people, it leads to mental illness.

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R.D Laing on the Nonsense of Categorisation, Homogeneity and Modernity

Famous Scottish psychiatrist, Dr R.D Laing offers prophetic insights given this video was originally recorded in the 1980's. The implications of categorization and homogeneity, in a modern world dominated by IT infrastructure, for creative leadership means it has become harder and harder for an individual to express and have accepted unique views if they cannot be categorized for later tagging on the world wide web. This video beautifully captures the nonsense of this prevailing ideology and suddenly we begin to see the cultural damage of homogeneity forced on the world by the IT industry.