I loved James Ward’s review of the book The Perfection of the Paper Clip. The book describes the invention histories of common office items like the pencil, the ballpoint pen, and the paper clip. Here’s Ward’s conclusion: Ideas, it turns out, are the easy bit. Making a prototype that works, honing the technology so that… Read More The Creation of Office Supplies
I just led a four-day intensive workshop for university professors, here at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. We grouped professors in teams, and guided them through the entrepreneurship process in just four days! It’s so intense that it’s known as the “boot camp.” The workshop was created in 2009, by Professor Holden Thorp.… Read More How To Foster Faculty Entrepreneurship
Pixar’s creative process has always followed a zig-zagging, improvisational process–one that’s perfectly aligned with the lessons emerging from creativity research. All of the research is showing that effective creativity, and exceptional creators, all follow an improvisational process: you don’t know where you’re going to end up, or when you’ll get there. It takes a while (and a… Read More The Pixar Film “Inside Out”: The Zigzag Creative Process Succeeds Again!
Perfect advice by William Zinsser: The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure who… Read More The Secret of Good Writing
You’ll be more creative if you learn about more stuff. And especially, if you learn about randomly different kinds of stuff. That’s why I’m writing about rodeo clowns: because I’m guessing you don’t know anything about them. And research shows that if you learn just a tiny bit about rodeo clowns (or anything else that… Read More Rodeo Clowns
Check out this story about how an invention emerged from an improvisational, wandering, zig-zag process, as James Dyson tells us about the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, in a letter to the editor in this morning’s Wall Street Journal: The U.S. is bold when it comes to invention. In 2014 there were more patents granted in… Read More The Zig-Zag Invention of the Dyson Airblade
The Creativity Guru 