I’ve been obsessed with this video for the past couple of days: The song is Nouvelle Vague covering Dance With Me by Lords of the New Church. It’s a great cover. The video is an even more inspired piece. Youtube user Luakabopper took the song and put it over this amazing dance sequence from Bande […]
Connecting ideas is the fundamental creative act in innovation. If this is the case, how do we get better at it? I was being interviewed in my office by a student yesterday for a project that she’s doing. As we talked, she kept looking at my bookshelves, with an increasingly confused look on her face. […]
I’m currently attending the XIIth European Conference on Creativity and Innovation. It’s much less academic than most of the conferences I go to, which is a refreshing change. I ran into a problem yesterday, though, which got me thinking. I gave my workshop on the first day. About 20 people came to it, and they […]
If your business model is based on information, and whose isn’t these days, then you need to be able to aggregate, filter and connect. While reflecting on the death of Borders Books, I thought of three stories of filtering in retail. First Story: Tower Records In the mid-80s, I went in to the Tower Records […]
Here is today’s exercise in connecting up ideas. First off, there’s this summary of the TEDGlobal conference from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter: Then, there’s this quote from Seth Godin at the 99% Conference: What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship. Godin expands on that […]
Three things that caught my eye yesterday: An excellent post by Helen Walters, which included this section: “The innovation shortcut is yours for the taking.” — This quote, from Gabor George Burt’s piece Why the Best Innovations Are About Relevance, Not Invention is the kind of statement to make blood run cold. Promising the earth […]
Here is a must-watch video from Eli Pariser discussing some of the themes from his new book The Filter Bubble (reviewed well here by Cory Doctorow). It’s only 9 minutes, and it is well worth your time: Pariser’s main point is that the primary filters on the internet these days are algorithmic, and that these […]
To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are: A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas. Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew […]
Malcolm Gladwell retells the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the latest issue of the New Yorker (it’s readable behind a paywall here). The story of PARC is fascinating, and Gladwell provides a nice twist to it. One of the main threads in the story concerns their invention of the laser printer. […]
