Today I was a participant in a fascinating symposium at Teachers College in New York City: the “Creativity, Imagination + Innovation Symposium.” Professors Margaret Crocco and Lori Custadero organized a very creative event, which opened on Thursday evening with a performance by the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, and ended tonight with a jazz quartet. Today’s events… Read More Creativity, Imagination + Innovation
I’ve been blogging about creativity in cartooning for years, ever since New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff contacted me about my book Group Genius. (See this post from October 23, 2009 for example). In a recent blog post on the New Yorker web site, Bob Mankoff proclaims that film critic Roger Ebert has just won… Read More Roger Ebert Wins the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest
The Technology Review March/April issue contains the second annual list of “the world’s most innovative technology companies”. Unlike other rankings, like Business Week and Fast Company, the fifty are not ranked; they’re just grouped into Public Companies and Private Companies. An asterisk indicates that the company is new to the list this year: Public Companies:… Read More MIT Technology Review 50 Most Innovative Companies
In my 2007 book Group Genius, I showed that the most innovative organizations were improvisational and team-focused. Early in the book, I tell how W. L. Gore developed the Elixir brand of guitar strings, with a team that formed spontaneously and unofficially. In Chapters 8 and 9, I describe many companies that create temporary, cross-disciplinary… Read More Sand Dune Teams
An article in Intelligent Life (August 2009) bemoans the “endangered species,” the polymath–a person who is successful at many different pursuits. In contrast to the narrow specialists who seem to rule today’s world, polymaths contribute to many different specialties throughout their careers. Past centuries had plenty of polymaths (perhaps Leonardo Da Vinci is the prototype).… Read More Polymaths No More?
A recent article in the New York Times* surveys a range of recent studies that compare human beings with lower primates, such as chimpanzees. It turns out that one of the biggest differences is our ability to collaborate and to form social networks. As anthropologist Kim Hill says, Humans are not special because of their… Read More Collaboration Drives Human Evolution
The Creativity Guru 