The Real World According to the Minds of Two Game Designers - A TED Collage

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.

The Creativity Crisis? What Creativity Crisis? - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

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.

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Google Wave, It's Spin Into Being and It's Failure | A Great Case Study in Innovation Failure If Anyone Involved Will Talk.

This story is a particular interesting one because it had the support of some extremely high profile organisations in Australia, in particularly the Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering that is wholely owned by the University of Sydney. Loudly proclaiming the success of Google Wave and its inventors. the Rasmussen brothers, the Warren Centre promoted it as their presitigious 2009 Innovation Lecture saying "...By attending the lecture you will not only gain a rare insider’s view of how this potentially world dominating technology has achieved what it has, you will also gain an insight into the very particular culture of Google that attracts, engages and inspires people to give of their best...." Here are some excerpts from this lecture. The video is worth viewing in light of what has occurred.

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The Content Economy :Why traditional intranets fail today's knowledge workers - by Oscar Berg:

“Flexible access to people and resources can be enormously powerful in a world driven by changes that, more often than not, lead us in unanticipated directions…we need to become more adept at ‘capability leverage’ – finding and accessing complementary capabilities, wherever they reside in the world, to deliver more value.” - From “The Power of Pull” by J Hagel, J S Brown, L Davidson Businesses, in particular in the Western world, are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive with an increasing part of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based work. A study by The Work Foundation has estimated that we have a 30-30-40 workforce - 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content. Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work

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Technology and Creativity - Why I Returned My iPad - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review

A little more than a week after buying the iPad, I returned it to Apple. The problem wasn't the iPad exactly, though it has some flaws. The problem was me. I like technology, but I'm not an early adopter. I waited for the second-generation iPod, the second-generation iPhone, and the second-generation MacBook Air. But the iPad was different. So sleek. So cool. So transformational. And, I figured, since it's so similar to the iPhone, most of the kinks would already be worked out. So at 4 PM on the day the 3G iPad was released, for the first time in my life, I waited in line for two hours to make a purchase. I set up my iPad in the store because I wanted to make sure I could start using it the very moment I bought it. And use it I did. I carried it with me everywhere; it's so small and thin and light, why not bring it along? I did my email on it, of course. But I also wrote articles using Pages. I watched episodes of Weeds on Netflix. I checked the news, the weather, and the traffic. And, of course, I proudly showed it to, well, anyone who indicated the least bit of interest. (That could be a whole post in itself. We proudly show off new purchases as though simply possessing them is some form of accomplishment. Why? I didn't create the iPad. I just bought one.)

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