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Today, creativity is a very hot topic. Creativity, which can be defined as the ability to come up with novel and useful ideas, is acknowledged to be a major source of innovation. But what do people across the globe think about creativity today? Do people consider themselves creative, or is creativity a skill for the happy few? Without knowing of each other’s initiatives, Adobe and eYeka have recently conducted almost identical surveys about creativity across the globe. Taken together, the results of both surveys tell a complementary story about the state of creativity.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read this in-depth post, the survey results and their implications, and to see the eye-opening infographics.]

As Bob Dylan’s birthday falls on Thursday, May 24, the American singer-songwriter has officially turned 71.

Bob Dylan has been described as being many different things over the span of his career - musician, artist, activist and poet being among the most popular.

But while Dylan’s music incorporates a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, it’s his evolution as an artist that music fans remember him most by.

Dylan’s physical and musical style defied anything that was relevant to pop music in the 60s and 70s, but both still managed to gain the attention of the burgeoning counterculture.

[Excerpt, click on the link to see the photos of Bob Dylan, and to read the rest of this post.]

The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore.

The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

Something is happening to the start-up culture—and I’m not sure I like what it’s doing to me.

For a couple of years now, one of the core start-up mantras has been “release early and release often”—or, even more pithy, “fail fast.”

There’s nothing wrong with this idea on the face of it. But combine it with the romanticized notion of working day and night narrowly focused on your start-up, and you have an entrepreneurial culture that’s fast-paced on a whole new level.

Most days, this is exciting and it is what’s required to keep up with the pace of innovation in the tech community. But more and more, I’m starting to think that the constant pressure to go-go-go may be killing more organizations than it’s helping.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

My answer was people who say no to a big idea are doing so out of some type of fear. It could be fear of change, failure, or the unknown. It could be fear of any number of other things.

There’s no single answer for addressing innovation fears across organizations. Your best strategy depends on the people and circumstances standing in the way of your big ideas. That’s what all the work we’ve done on Taking the NO Out of InNOvation is all about. Here are nine initial possibilities thought to consider for conquering risk-related innovation fears within your organization when you’re the one who is pushing for making big ideas happen.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

One of the best Twitter names that I’ve come across in the past few years is @ShowerThinker – almost as cool as mine – @innovate. It’s an account for an inventor that makes post-it notes for the shower called Aqua Notes.

This Twitter name captures a well-understood fact – that a lot of great ideas (and ultimately innovations) come to us not from brainstorming, but from the connection to our subconscious that occurs in the shower (or pretty much anywhere else in the bathroom). If so many great ideas come to us when our active mind is elsewhere, then why is such little attention paid to this source of innovation.

A lot has been written about creativity and the brain, left brain vs. right brain thinking, and how often the brain just needs to get out of its own way for creativity to occur as there is no single creative area of the brain.

In my own cuarto de bano moment, I came up with this contrasting phrase to help us frame the conversation – Instinctual Innovation versus Intellectual Innovation.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post, and to see the video clip and infographic.]

Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?

In Silicon Valley, engineers are honor students and everyone else is taking remedial math. Venture Capitalists often express disdain for startup CEOs who are not engineers. Silicon Valley parents send their kids to college expecting them to major in a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) discipline. The theory goes as follows: STEM degree holders will get higher pay upon graduation and get a leg up in the career sprint.

Over the past two years, I have interviewed the founders of more than 300 Silicon Valley start-ups. The most common traits I have observed are a passion to change the world and the confidence to defy the odds and succeed. Any discussion of this nature must return to a comparison of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. True, Jobs was technically competent. But he had, if anything, an eclectic educational background where he spent as much time in seeming arcana such as philosophy and calligraphy as he did on math and engineering.

I’d take that a step further. I believe humanity majors make the best project managers, the best product managers, and, ultimately, the most visionary technology leaders. The reason is simple. Technologists and engineers focus on features and too often get wrapped up in elements that may be cool for geeks but are useless for most people. In contrast, humanities majors can more easily focus on people and how they interact with technology.

[Excerpts, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]

“There’s a subsection of people in the Valley who think the only way to be successful is to create a viral overnight hit,” says Dave Morin, CEO of the social-networking app Path, which attracted nearly a million registered users in its first year. That’s a more modest start than, say, Pinterest, but Morin points out that Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Twitter all took years to gain millions of users.

He’s right: New technology isn’t like a movie, a finished product that you either like or you don’t. High-quality tech products take time—after they’re released. It’s relatively easy to get a lot of people to check out your new thing: see MySpace, Chatroulette, or any number of Zynga games. But it takes more determined work, more trial and error, to keep them using your product. Look at all of Facebook’s redesigns, missteps, and reorganizations on the path to winning big.

Lasting technologies also need an ecosystem of complementary products.

[Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this post.]