Listen to What Innovators Don't Talk About - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

While working away on my laptop at a hotel breakfast, I couldn't help but overhear the four gentlemen poring over an iPad two tables way. Their intense discussion revolved around rolling out their high-tech prototypes in a medical care complex. Since I've written about prototypes and prototyping, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. Forgive me. The foursome represented a mix of medical care complex personnel and what was clearly an entrepreneurial innovator with a potentially high-impact idea. I'll skip the technical details, but this was clearly a sophisticated group who were both smart and ambitious. The prototypes were their gateways to success. Their debates included whether it made more sense to

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How Artists Will Have Nothing To Do With Economists: Q&A with David Galenson, Economic Historian, University of Chicago

Why is a shark in a tank of formaldehyde, the brainchild of Damien Hirst, such a celebrated piece at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why is a pile of rocks, designed by Robert Smithson, one of the most important installations in the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing? David Galenson, Professor of Economics and the College, is the author of a new book, Conceptual Revolutions in 20th Century Art, which he says answers one of the most vexing questions of contemporary culture: Why is much of contemporary art so bizarre, and seemingly lacking in the intrinsic appeal and stylistic coherence of previous eras? Galenson, an economic historian, isn't as well known as colleagues Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) or Richard Thaler (Nudge), but his work on art has been far from ignored. He's been the subject of feature stories in Wired, the New York Times, the Financial Times and the New Yorker, in which Malcolm Gladwell described at length "Galeson's idea that creativity can be divided into types."

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The Business Case for Reading Novels - Anne Kreamer - Harvard Business Review

I've been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child's newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn't I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Or catching up on my back issues of The Economist? That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I'm reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.

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To Inspire Innovation, Get a Muse - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

Yves Saint Laurent and Pablo Picasso — brilliant entrepreneurs as well as celebrated artistes — claimed inspiration from muses.So, apparently, did Steve Jobs. Perhaps the newly-knighted Sir Jonathan Ive has one, too. Creative dynamos have always sought the frisson of the divine revelatory spark. So they look to a muse for energy inspiration. Does your business — should your innovators — have a muse?

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This is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity

A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists have discovered that when jazz musicians improvise, their brains turn off areas linked to self-censoring and inhibition, and turn on those that let self-expression flow.

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