Why Some Think P&G's Innovation Is Slipping | Jack Neff - Advertising Age

Tucked in an area north of Cincinnati is an office-warehouse building that looks like a movie set. It contains fully functional mockups of two homes (one upper-middle class, one lower-income) complete with kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms. It has two mock grocery stores and a virtual-reality lab where you can fly over store shelves. And, just like a front operation in a spy thriller, the complex is innocuously called BRI Research -- to avoid letting consumers know that they're involved in studies for Procter & Gamble. This is the Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, or BRIC, in P&G parlance. And P&G, whose innovation record has come under growing scrutiny, hopes it can deliver. Analysts and investors are decidedly unimpressed with P&G these days.

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The Creative Brain and How It Works - Applied Neuroscience: A New Workshop with Silvia Damiano and Ralph Kerle

There is a body of theories and papers starting to emerge in neuroscience around how our brain works creatively. This body of work suggests if you can be more aware of how your brain works in a context that calls upon creative endeavour, you will be able to alter your thinking or adjust your actions, in the process becoming more aware of your own creative praxis and how you can comfortably and confidently contribute your best to creative collaboration and awareness that can be knowledgeably sustained and improved over time.

In this highly experiential session, participants will

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When ideas have sex | Matt Ridley Video

British author Matt Ridley knows one thing: Through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, the mating of ideas. The sophistication of the modern world, says Ridley, lies not in individual intelligence or imagination; it is a collective enterprise. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Ridley (whose previous works include Genome and Nature via Nurture) sweeps the entire arc of human history to powerfully argue that "prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else." It is our habit of trade, idea-sharing and specialization that has created the collective brain which set human living standards on a rising trend. This, he says, "holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead -- because ideas are having sex with each other as never before."

Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision - Harvard Business Review

In the past decade, firms have been praised for ideas. Experts have celebrated the power of brainstorming and idea-generation techniques. Eureka light bulbs have populated the covers of many books. Businessmen have been asked to improve their creative attitudes. And 2009 was named the Year of Creativity and Innovation by the European Union. One consequence of a decade focused on idea generation is ideas are now more easily accessible, which has also made idea generation less of a differentiator in competition than it has traditionally been. When more than 30% of the population belongs to the creative class, as Richard Florida suggested in his 2003 book The Rise of the Creative Class, ideas are not in short supply. And with the diffusion of open innovation processes, ideas competitions, and the like, executives are increasingly exposed to a wealth of ideas.

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Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger"

Steve Kemper was given complete behind-the-scenes access to Dean Kamen and the Segway design team during development of the much-hyped "human transporter." The result: A new book, Code Name Ginger. Here's an excerpt

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