Richard Branson should endorse the IdeaFestival

Having just used Steve Jobs to make a point below about promoting creativity in business, I ran across this piece from Richard Branson, another iconic and successful entrepreneur, who describes how his successful organization targets new opportunity by putting "a priority on... remaining open to new ideas." Give it a read, but first check out this paragraph:

Our choices were not random or merely reactive, but guided by our decision to take an entrepreneurial approach to expansion. Instead of pushing our teams to do ever more intensive analysis to pick our next venture – which can slow the whole business down – I set a priority on our remaining open to new ideas. It is one of the reasons that I always urge people to pursue their own interests outside work and to take regular vacations. Exercising your creativity in other settings isn’t just relaxing; you’ll stay informed about developments in other fields and connect with a wider circle of people than you might encounter at work. Keeping your thinking fresh and original makes good business sense!

Staying "informed about developments in other fields" to "keep your thinking fresh and original" because "it makes good business sense?" OK, so Richard Branson didn't endorse the IdeaFestival. But Sir Richard, please! Don't be a tease.

We're ready when you are.

Check out this video of one those ventures shot from the window of a Virgin America flight.

Wayne

Cutting the crap

If the key to wisdom is "knowing what to overlook," as the philosopher William James said, the corollary in professional work, particularly creative professional work, is knowing that most of your work sucks.

Photographer A.J. Kessler:

If your goal is to produce outstanding work, in any field, recognize that most of what you produce is going to suck.  To get from 'suck' to 'awesome' takes a huge amount of effort and skill.  If you’re a landscape/wedding/street/bird/extreme-sports photographer, you’re chances of producing great work in any one of these areas is pretty slim, and the odds of producing great work in all five is almost nil. If you’re a software company that’s trying to cram in every last feature possible, maybe you would be better served by making a few key features outstanding.

Having grown from a fading also-ran in its own industry to the world's second most valuable company, Apple has executed an incredible turnaround on the strength of one category-busting device after another. Yet when he came back to the company, Steve Jobs pared the product line from 350 to just 10.

Not everyone is a Jobs when it comes to an eye for industrial design. And in any case, chances are that that person isn't the CEO. But here's the problem. While one will encounter very few that will argue against the value of creativity, Adam Hartung at Forbes cites studies drawn from business that show a gap between knowing and doing in the business world.

While 1,500 CEOs say that creativity is the single most important quality for success today – and studies bear out the greater success of creative, innovative leaders – the study found that when it came to hiring and promoting practices businesses consistently marked down the creative managers and bypassed them, selecting less creative types!

So forget the accomplishments and recent history for a moment. Could Steve Jobs find a job today?

In the photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee above, Steve Wozniak displays a first generation iPhone at the 2007 IdeaFestival. The phone was not hurt in the wrestling match that ensued.

Wayne

Kiss and tell

What are our lips telling us?

Recently back from TED Global in Scotland, Sheril Kirshenbaum, biologist, science journalist and author of the "Science of Kissing: What our lips are telling us," will participate in IdeaFestival 2011.

Sheril recently described why she was interested in the IdeaFestival in her aptly named blog, "Convergence," at Wired, saying it brought together "science, the arts, business, design, technology, education, medicine and more." Check out and then come back.

The lowest priced all-access passes are now on sale for a limited time only.

Wayne

Chance favors the "connected" business

"Chance favors the connected mind." - Steven Johnson, author of "Where Good Ideas Come From"

One of my favorite bloggers on creativity is Douglas Eby, who recently posted these thoughts on Incubating Innovation and Creativity:

One of the theoretical four stages of creativity (along with preparation, illumination, and verification), incubation is defined as 'a process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas at some later point in time.'

Eby links to the video here of John Dabiri, a Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering at Caltech, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010. Dabiri's work,

'draws on a wide range of fields—including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics—to unravel the secrets of one of the earliest means of animal locomotion,' according to a profile on the MacArthur site.

Dabiri's sources his ideas about wind power, for example, to the dynamics of fish schooling. It's one illustration of how his learned - "preparation" is one state of creativity! - and connected mind is predisposed to novel ideas in engineering.   

The IdeaFestival is similarly about making new connections, and annually brings together top thinkers, tinkerers and creatives to describe their work and inspiration. While Eby's interest in Dabiri's work is primarily intellectual, the connected, or creative, process isn't merely of academic interest. David Barnes and Heather Howell, for example, will explore business innovation at IdeaFestival 2011.

If you're wondering whether the "connected" business has a real-world payoff, think about this: sixty percent of Apple's 2010 revenue was derived from products that didn't even exist four years ago.

Wayne

"What we do here will improve life on Earth."

Early in this video tour of the space station shot during TED Global, astronaut Ron Garan says "What we do here will improve life on Earth."

It's true. During any six-month period, about 200 experiments of all kinds are being conducted on station. In fact, the use of micro-gravity for bio-medical research has become a hot topic.

One might fly, for example, glioblastoma cells, or experiment with how neuronal growth cones cope in space. Not only is there basic science to be done, but experiments at these heights might result in therapies that can be applied at the bottom of the gravity well.

At IdeaFestival 2011, Program Scientist for the International Space Station, Dr. Julie Robinson, will describe the science being done - much of it paid for by commercial interests - on humanity's orbiting laboratory now that it has been completed. The answers might indeed be out there.

Of equal interest to the casual observer, is the commercialization of access to orbit. The shuttle is a magnificent machine, and the ISS could not have been built without it. But Atlantis' landing Thursday, while sad, is certainly not the end of the "space program." Several private sector organizations are vying to deliver cargo and humans to the ISS - you might watch this video of one competitor's ride to orbit - which will let NASA set its sights, and use its increasingly scarce public resources, on destinations beyond low Earth orbit.

Wayne