For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it. Reprinted from Newsweek.com Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed […]
The story goes like this: The great Henri Matisse was teaching painting to a group of students in Paris. He asked the class: “who here wants to become a great painter”? All of the students raised their hands enthusiastically. “Then what are you doing here?,” the Master responded. “Go home and paint.” The point here is […]
You may have caught CNBC’s re-broadcast of “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” the brilliant documentary about Enron’s spectacular rise and fall. It’s easy to view Lay, Skilling, Fastow and the rest as a creative bunch. Again and again they came up with innovative scams to fool Wall Street into thinking the company was profitable […]
This April Fool’s gag about Kodak’s new “aromatography” almost had me there for a minute. Because despite how outrageous the idea, it’s actually kind of plausible. Why not have photos that emit an aroma? Or if not an aroma, perhaps a sound? Or music? Or a story? It’s this kind of thinking–imagining the dumbest, most ridiculous, most obnoxious ideas–that […]
We often think that creative problem-solving must result in something entirely new. That it’s all about game changers, disruptions and paradigm shifts. A recent study in the Harvard Business Review begs to differ. Imitation, it argues, “can actually be more important to business growth than innovation.” But there might be an even more surefire route […]
