Evaluation, Rewards, Competition and Contraints -- Their Effects on Creativity - Teresa Amabile

Teresa Amabile is a well-known creativity researcher, who has focussed on the effects on creativity produced by evaluation, rewards, competition and constraints. I find it very interesting that Dr. Amabile is a professor of business administration (and at Harvard University). Some material from her book, Creativity in Context (1996, Westview Press) is summarized below. According to Amabiles experimental results, evaluation (as, say, good or bad) and rewards have very similar results on creativity. The results depend upon the nature of the task -- is it * Heuristic, where many possibilities must be explored OR * Algorithmic, where the task is primarily a linear series of steps, where the order is clear.

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Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater By Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter is more like A Load of Bull...t!!

The article Adopt a Cow: Strategy as Improvisational Theater recently penned by Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter from Harvard Business School is a perfect example of why business schools and their academics are being questioned as to their relevancy to the real world of business. Professor Kanter is neither a business entrepreneur, although she gets paid well for public speaking about her writing on business, nor is she a person of the theatre, more like a theatre critic, someone who is not practised in the theatre but instead is practised writing about it.

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Cultivating Innovation And Creativity, Not Managing It - Nussbaum on Design, BusinessWeek

Bruce Nussbaum gets my award as the most consistently correct journalist on the topic of creativity and innovation and although the design principles he outlines below are not new, he is one journalist who is well informed, good at information gathering and sharing his knowledge simply and articulately around this topic.. Here is his latest post. There is a big movement in B-Schools and Design Schools to generate a new liberal arts paradigm that goes beyond learning how to think critically about an individual’s role in society to learning how to build critically based on people’s connection to cultural context. Call it Pragmatic Liberal Arts or Practical Liberal Arts. I call it Innovation Arts or Design Arts because it focusses on the “as if…” prototyping and creating that goes on in serious play (and which our schools succeed in stamping out by grade 2). I’ll be discussing the idea of a new Innovation Arts paradigm at The Future of Design confab in Stanford next week.

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Crash course in learning theory

I recently stumbled across a very neat little blog commmunity aptly titled The Creating Passionate Users. This community of bloggers claim they are fascinated by brains, minds and what science can tell us about the practice of making users passionate about their lives and tools. The community is co-ordinated by Dan Russell, a full-time research scientist and software developer at Google who has a PhD from the University of Rochester in Artificial Intelligence and Kathy Sierra who has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin', MGM). Crash course in learning theory looks at blogging as an educational tool rather than a sales or self promotional tool.

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