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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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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Contemporary Creativity - The Social System of People, Technology, Media - Goonth's Blog

Early in my career as a creator of film and television content, I quickly found myself confined by what media allowed me, or didn’t allow me, to do. My transition into the interactive space alleviated some of these hurdles, but I soon realized that there was a much bigger issue at play, one that called to the reality that media ecosystems were becoming exponentially more complex, and that no one medium could replace or define our roles as marketers. I tell this story often because it is important that we understand the meaning and value of what creativity is, as well as what it can do for us when we look at it from a more holistic perspective. To me, creativity is the process by which intent and action passionately align

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50+ Tools for Web Based Collaboration - Popwuping

The following is a highlight of a competitive analysis I did earlier this year when I was involved in designing software that would allow remote research teams to work together. While software is still a long way from replacing all in-person collaboration it's becoming easier for remote or mobile workers to stay productive and communicative with their team. Certainly the tools we have available today are a vast improvement over what I used when I first tried telecommuting 12 years ago! There are many articles out there covering similar if not exactly the same ground. Hopefully you will find some gems in mine.

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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.