CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

 A huge reaction against teaching to the test is underway and the US is desperately seating for a new educational curriculum to promote creativity in its children. Ironically, there is already a 100-year old methodology that is a wonderful way for K-12 children to increase their creative capacities–Progressive Education. It is no accident that Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Sergey Brin all went to Montessori school. Many other startup founders majored in Design or Art in college, learning in very similar classroom environments.

Creativity can be learned. We can all learn to be more creative. And many of us can learn to be exceptionally creative.

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I show how creativity is directly linked to entrepreneurialism. We can all learn creative competencies that increase economic value, whether it is in the starting up of a new company or the launch of new services and products that engage customers. 

In early January, City & Country, one of the earliest Progressive Education-based schools in New York City and in the US is celebrating its centennial birthday and if you can, you should come.  The event will be in the beautiful modernist Tishman Auditorium, designed by Joseph Urban,  at The New School (also founded as a Progressive Education style school with John Dewey as its leader).

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-power-of-progressive-education-can-creative-thinking-be-taught-tickets-9448038337

There will be great speakers, from Kickstarter, the Rockwell Group, Vimeo, RGA, MIT, Kid-O and yours truly. 

Progressive Education=Creativity=Entrepreneurship

Jan Chipchase is one of my big heroes. In my book, Creative Intelligence, I talk about the need to “mine the existential” in cultures to understand the deeper meaning of people’s lives. Jan has been a pioneer in mining the existential, from China to America and beyond for Frog Design. He has an insightful comment about Google Glass we should all read. 

Jan is one of the growing number of “thought leaders” being offered Google Glass to wear and comment on, building knowledge–and political support. Jan turned Google down. He’s worried about Google’s privacy problem–that it continuously violates peoples’ privacy. Here’s the comment.

https://medium.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/5e4089a9a3ac

I presented at Google recently on the five Creative Competencies of Creative Intelligence and began by thanking Google for saving my life. I’ve never been able to tell direction–left and right–and felt that i lived in a constant state of lost. Google Maps changed my life. It had deep existential meaning for me. I was no longer lost.

But, like Jan, I also questioned Google Glass. I put up a slide of a pretty woman wearing the glasses (all the pictures are of good-looking young people), and said it embodied the values of Googles’ Gen Y engineering founders. Great technology that could do cool stuff. They used the “Gift” model of innovation–use tech to invent new things and throw it over the wall to society.  

But in this case, society is wary of Google’s intentions and worried about the impact of Google Glass on privacy.Taking data without asking appears to be baked into the deep DNA of Google–from taking content, to taking books to taking emails and other data when taking pictures for Google Maps. All put on Search.

What would Google Glass “take?” I don’t know. And neither does Jan. and neither do you.

Jan has a new book out–Hidden in Plain Site.

http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Plain-Sight-Extraordinary-ebook/dp/B008B0ULDW

It’s really good. 

I just love this review of the book by the Portland Book Review. It captures the message of Creative Intelligence which is that we are ALL creative and can learn to be MORE creative.

http://www.portlandbookreview.com/tag/creative-intelligence-harnessing-the-power-to-create/

I’ve been speaking at Google, Microsoft and a lot of other companies in the past weeks about the message of Creative Intelligence it is remarkable how many engineers, doctors, scientists and other “analytical” people say they are not creative–only to prove they really are once I ask them what they actually do. 

Anyone who is good at seeing patterns is creative.  People who do that using numbers and , engineers for example, typically don’t see themselves as creative. BUT THEY ARE! 

I will be speaking at Ziba Design, one of the greatest design and innovation consultancies in the world, in PDX on May 9. It’s founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, taught me that Design is not just about process and thinking but about love–that powerful attraction you feel for an object, an experience. It’s about the beckoning, the aura, the culture. Come and have a conversation with us. The book has great stories of Ziba’s research and success in China. 

And it will be on sale there if you don’t want to buy it now on Amazon or B&N.

In reading the Financial Times’ coverage of the teen entrepreneur Nick D'Aloisio, you can see how he used many Creative Competencies to create his Summly App which Yahoo just bought for $30 million.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7755d5be-956b-11e2-a4fa-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Oea4EQIm

D'Aloisio used Knowledge Mining to connect three key dots of knowledge that he embodied as a 15 year-old living in London circa 2013. They are  information (access to knowledge is a changing world is critical ); brevity (we like long-form writing but want it in short-form summaries); mobility (we want it anywhere, all the time). These are the same elements that go into Twitter and Vine. 

He scaled his creativity into creation by getting his idea into TechCrunch, a platform that angel investors observe for possible new startups. His first investor was Li-Kashing, a Chinese billionaire. His venture capital firm, Horizons Venture saw his early work in TechCrunch. Li, or the people who worked for him, was a “wanderer” who cruised different sites looking for potential startups. Ashton Kutcher, Stephen Fry and Spotify;s Shakil Khan wandered into D'Aloisio’s world and back him as well. 

Finally, Marissa Mayer, the ex-Google, now CEO of Yahoo, really scaled D'Aloisio by giving him a huge platform. Just as Google really scaled the startup YouTube, so too is Yahoo scaling Summly.

I’d like to learn more about the creative process of D'Aloisio. He learned code as a kid, according to the press. But who did he play with? Who did he bounce ideas off? Most creative people have a trusted friend, or two, where they mess around with ideas. Who is Nick’s creative buddy?

I went back to the June 2006 cover of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly supplement I founded at BusinessWeek to look at Marissa Mayer’s 9 Notions of Innovation. The subtitle was "Marissa Mayer, The Talent Scout.“  Mayer has Stanford U degrees in symbolic systems and computer science and patents in Artificial Intelligence.  She was the first female engineer at Google, its #20 hire and took charge of search products and the user experience.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-18/marissa-mayer-the-talent-scout

Here are her "9 Notions of Innovation:

1-Ideas comes from everywhere. Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team

2- Share everything you can. Every idea, every project, every deadline–it’s all accessible to everyone on the internet

3- You’re brilliant,  we’re hiring. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience.

4- A license to pursue dreams. Employees get a "free” day a week. Half of new launches come from this “20% time.”

5- Innovation, not instant perfection. Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely.

6- Don’t politic, use data. Mayer discourages the use of “I like” in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics.

7- Creativity loves restraint. Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines.

8- Worry about usage and users, not money. Provide something simple to use and easy to love. The money will follow. 

9- Don’t kill projects–morph them. There’s always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.“

The controversy surrounding Mayer’s decision to end remote working and have everyone be physically present in the office is reflected in these notions of how you generate innovation. It is a very Silicon Valley, techie model of brilliant engineers coming up with new techie functions that are then tossed out into the world to see if there is an audience for them. It often works. It more often fails.

There is a much better way–understand what is culturally meaningful to people and THEN generate the innovation that satisfies their aspirations. Or do both simultaneously and have engineers and designers work together to design new products and services.

Either way, what Google and Yahoo need right now is to get the cultural meaning  part right. They need to move beyond the engineer-centric reliance on numbers and data to tell them about the world and get into the world itself to understand it. They might find that the employees  staying home and raising their children have important ideas for the products and services that are meaningful to millions of people.

I talk about Knowledge Mining and Framing in Creative Intelligence. It just may be that Mayer and her old bosses at Google need to rely less on the "best” intelligence of their engineers and more on the creative intelligence of people who embody the lives of their customers. Then they could reframe who and how they employ and what they actually offer up in the marketplace.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

I remember my first ride on the Segway, Dean Kamen’s incredible invention. I got up on the two-wheel thing, pushed forward and I was away, moving quickly, turning, having great fun. The Segway was supposed to change everything–how we moved along in cities, how we left cars behind, how we saved energy, how we went to war, etc. It didn’t.

In the end, it was a wonderful piece of technology in search of human purpose. It became an expensive novelty.If it had been framed differently, if the culture and history of transportation had been mined deeply, if it had been made more cheaply–in short, if Kamen had used a few of the 5 Creative Competencies in Creative Intelligence, his technology might have found traction with a big audience.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/technology/google-looks-to-make-its-computer-glasses-stylish.html?hpw&_r=0

Google is doing the same thing with its Google Glasses. It’s new technology is very cool but there is no connection to people. Right now it is a gadget made by gadgeteers for other gadgeteers in search of a broader popular audience. Throwing new invention over the wall to designers is an old way of doing things that sometimes works just fine (hey, Search is great, right?) but often does not (remember the old VCRs with a million useless functions?

There is a better way. Creative Intelligence.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

The first class of the new Cornell-Technion school of engineering (which appears to be what is being built in NYC) opened in Google’s NYC headquarters this week. That’s not good news. Goggle is a remarkable company but it is totally male/tech/engineering driven. I guess Technion is that way too. Brilliant guys come up with terrific new tech ideas and then–and only then–try to find a cultural/social need for them. Clearly that tech-driven strategy works but it feels very 20th century.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20130122/TECHNOLOGY/130129981#.UQgD61XYrcI.twitter

Most of the hot new startups are founded by designers or people with a big exposure to design. We have the Design Fund and a couple of dozen new companies to prove that. And then there is New York City. This city, my city, runs on culture, not technology. The hottest firms here, RGA, Kickstarter and the media and marketing firms, know this.

The real business of business in New York is mining the existential. It’s excavating the meaning of America’s changing demographics, ethnic shifts, gender changes, class movements.  Its about understanding global cities and urban cultures. 

Creativity is about mining this kind of social and cultural knowledge and connecting it to the appropriate technologies–some of them new, some old. The food truck revolution–a part of the revived Maker Culture–involves OLD technology–trucks.

The real reason I wanted Stanford to win the contest to build a new school in NYC was not that it would bring its world-class engineering to the city. A Stanford win would have brought the D-School to New York. It would have brought design, creativity and innovation to the mix of technology and business. 

Cornell Technion needs a C-School, a Creativity School, to really work in NYC.