"Against Creativity, Oli Mould"

"How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken author: Jesse Browner publisher: Harper Wave pub date: 06.30.2015 pp: 288"

"That’s why the people who most benefit from multiples — and from thinking out loud online — will probably remain in the nonprofit world: Artists, activists, and everyday people pursuing their side passions. They know the secret: Fun, crazy ideas are surprising common; fun, crazy people are surprisingly common. We just have to connect the dots."

"Selecting among alternative innovative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the “intellectual distance” between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator’s own expertise systematically relates to the evaluations given (and consequent resource allocation). We empirically evaluate effects in data collected from a grant proposal process at a leading research university in which we randomized the assignment of evaluators and proposals to generate 2,130 evaluator-proposal pairs. We find evaluators systematically give lower scores to research proposals closer to their own areas of expertise, and to highly novel research proposals. We interpret the empirical patterns in relation to a range of theoretical mechanisms and discuss implications for policy, managerial intervention and allocation of resources in the ongoing accumulation of scientific knowledge."

"Prevailing theories on creativity focus on methodology, or amount of practice. But new studies suggest artistic talent may be more hard-wired than we thought."

"I find it pleasing that science cannot account for genius. I do not myself believe in miracles, but I do have a strong taste for mysteries, and the presence, usually at lengthy intervals, of geniuses is among the great ones. Schopenhauer had no explanation for the existence of geniuses, either, but, even while knowing all the flaws inherent in even the greatest among them, he held that geniuses “were the lighthouses of humanity; and without them mankind would lose itself in the boundless sea of error and bewilderment.” The genius is able to fulfill this function because he is able to think outside himself, to see things whole while the rest of us at best see them partially, and he has the courage, skill, and force to break the logjam of fixed opinions and stultified forms. Through its geniuses the world has made what serious progress it has thus far recorded. God willing, we haven’t seen the last of them."

"In structural analyses of innovation, one substantive question looms large: What makes radical innovation possible if peripheral actors are more likely to originate radical ideas but are poorly positioned to promote them? An inductive study of the rise of Cubism, a revolutionary paradigm that overthrew classic principles of representation in art, results in a model where not only the periphery moves toward the core through collective action, as typically asserted, but the core also moves toward the periphery, becoming more receptive to radical ideas. The fragmentation of the art market in early 20th-century Paris served as the trigger. The proliferation of market niches and growing ambiguity over evaluation standards dramatically reduced the costs of experimentation in the periphery and the ability of the core to suppress radical ideas. A multilevel analysis linking individual creativity, peer networks, and the art field reveals how market developments fostered Spanish Cubist Pablo Picasso's experiments and facilitated their diffusion in the absence of public support, a coherent movement, and even his active involvement. If past research attests to the importance of framing innovations and mobilizing resources in their support, this study brings attention to shifts in the structure of opportunities to do so."

"It’s not that Picasso’s talent was immaterial to Cubism’s success – far from it. It’s that his talents were perfectly suited to the movement of the market. In a world that was increasingly rewarding experimentation, he was more energetically experimental than his peers: he made over seven hundred sketches of Les Demoiselles before settling on one that satisfied him. In an art scene that was becoming more open to diverse influences, he looked further afield than most of his competitors, to ancient Etruscan and African art. In a milieu that romanticised the exotic, he was a mysterious, black-eyed Spanish immigrant who spoke barely any French. At a time when it was cool to bend the rules of art, Picasso smashed every one. For radical innovation to succeed, the moment has to be moving towards the innovator. But the innovator must still reach out and seize the moment."

"Online crowdsourced art is the practice of using the Internet as a participatory platform to directly engage the public in the creation of visual, musical, literary, or dramatic artwork, with the goal of showcasing the relationship between the collective imagination and the individual artistic sensibilities of its participants. Discussing key examples and analyzing this artistic practice within multiple theoretical frameworks, this article fills a critical gap in the study of contemporary art and participatory culture by developing a typology of online crowdsourced art and exploring the levels of artistic participation. In view of its reliance on the artistic contribution of a large pool of geographically disperse participants, this type of art raises important questions about notions of collective creativity, authorship, and the aesthetic significance of digital participation."

"Patents, for all their flaws, are a widely used proxy for innovation. And a new study from the Brookings Institution shows just how clustered patent-related innovation is in America."

Here’s what I propose. In the 21st century, we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

"As a public school teacher, I've come to believe that good teaching comes down to six essential practices. I call them Inducement, Conveyance, Meta-Learning, Empowerment, Modeling, and Application. Just as when all eight amino acids must be present for a protein to form, all six of these activities must be present for Good Teaching (and Good Learning) to occur."

"Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was "captured" by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony

"The Creators Project is a global celebration of art and technology.

Founded by a revolutionary partnership between Intel and VICE, The Creators Project supports visionary artists across multiple disciplines who are using technology in innovative ways to push the boundaries of creative expression."

"What I love most about this is how inclusive it is, and how much of it is about recognizing and embracing what an amazingly creative time this is for artists. All too often, we hear of artists who decry such things, who complain about the fact that their club doesn't feel as exclusive any more. For artists and an art exhibit to not just embrace, but joyfully celebrate the way creativity works today, while recognizing how these tools mean that anyone and everyone are creating art all the time, is really wonderful to see."

"I can see several reasons for why organization theorists don’t engage with these types of, “futurist” questions. First, theories of organization tend to lag practice. That is, organizational scholars describe and explain the world (in its current or past state), though they don’t often engage in speculative forecasting (about possible future states). Second, many of the organizational sub-fields suited for wide-eyed speculation are in a bit of a lull, or they represent small niches. For example, organization design isn’t a super “hot” area these days (certainly with exceptions) — despite its obvious importance. Institutional and environmental theories of organization have taken hold in many parts, and agentic theories are often seen as overly naive. Environmental and institutional theories of course are valuable, but they delimit and are incremental, and are perhaps just self-fulfilling and thus may not always be practically helpful for thinking about the future.

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"Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. "

"Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?"

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started with evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman, who used it to explain how such powerful biological innovations as sight and flight came into being. More recently, Steven Johnson, in Where Good Ideas Come From, showed that it's also applicable to science, culture, and technology. The core of the idea: People arrive at the best new ideas when they combine prior (adjacent) ideas in new ways. Most combinations fail

"The stories we tell ourselves about creative achievement nearly always focus on the holy grail of inspiration, and leave out the rather important bits about perspiration."

"The point can be made more general: surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. And in the few circumstances where that is not true – where inventions truly are "singletons" – it is often because of an accident or error in the experiment rather than a conscious effort to invent. "

"There is a bad tendency in this country to think our “innovation deficit” lies in what policy makers call STEM (science,technology, engineering and math). But Jobs understands that the magic formula is STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math). It is the basis of what we teach at The innovation Lab and it is the core of the Apple brand. Steve’s obsessive belief in the role of the artist goes way beyond his early fascination with typography. What makes each of his products so thrilling is that they are aesthetically pleasing just to look at, never mind how cool they are to operate."

"It isn't hard to see why a bureaucracy, entrusted with spending billions of taxpayer dollars, is more concerned with minimising losses than maximizing gains. And the NIH approach does have its place. The Santa Fe complexity theorists Stuart Kaufman and John Holland have shown that the ideal way to discover paths through a shifting landscape of possibilities is to combine baby steps and speculative leaps. The NIH is funding the baby steps. Who is funding the speculative leaps? The Howard Hughes Medical Institute invests huge sums each year, but only about one-twentieth of 1 percent of the world's global R