I’m here in beautiful Aspen, Colorado, at the tenth annual Aspen Ideas Festival. Yesterday afternoon, I gave a tutorial session about how to be more creative, drawing on my new book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity. This morning, I woke up very early, and was reading the New York Times during morning… Read More The Most Entertaining Obituary Ever…and, the Aspen Ideas Festival 2014
Two professors at Northwestern University have been arguing: Is the age of innovation coming to an end? Professor Robert Gordon, a 73-year-old economist, argues that we’re nearing the end of a historically unusual period of rapid innovation. Professor Gordon knows that we’ve invented many amazing things in the past 250 years; he just thinks today’s… Read More Will We Ever Invent Anything Important Again?
As I writer, I often buy and read books about writing. Here are some of my favorite famous quotations, from the book The Writer’s Quotation Book: A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. — Thomas Mann Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.… Read More Great Quotations About Writing
I just read some fascinating research by Marshall W. Van Alstyne in Harvard Business Review. The figure below shows a network of high collaboration on the left, and a network of much lower collaboration on the right. The explanation turns out to be simple: it’s caused by two very different incentive systems. Alstyne found that “the… Read More Create Collaboration With The Right Incentives
I have something to celebrate: I just received a copy of the Chinese language translation of my book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, here it is! To my Chinese blog followers, the publisher is East China Normal University Press. This is my third book to be translated into Chinese; the others are Group… Read More Sawyer’s Book “Explaining Creativity” Published in Chinese
Toward the end of an interview with the groundbreaking chef Ferran Adria, TIME reporter Belinda Luscombe says: You talk a lot about creativity, but you actually seem to be emphasizing expertise. Which is more important? Adria, the chef who created El Bulli, considered the best restaurant in the world, answered: If I understand what I’m doing,… Read More Creativity = Expertise? Discuss…
The Creativity Guru 