More on corporate innovation and creativity… With all this news, praise and marvel at Apple’s rise to the top of the heap of corporate giants (with a good dose of less than flattering publicity on their manufacturing conditions overseas), Steve Lohr takes a look at both trends and differing styles of innovation and creativity with companies today. He highlights well known differences between Apple (“more edited, intuitive and top-down”) and Google (“relies on rapid experimentation and data”). The piece also cites the fact that the National Science Foundation has adopted a more aggressive strategy to increase commercialization of the university research and how GE is actively looking to increase the pace of innovation. With all this attention and analysis of what defines innovation, can we expect another wave of extraordinary advances and a new growth spurt or dare we say bubble? And don’t forget all that big corporate cash squirreled away for the last couple years… Think creative(ly).
Month: January 2012
Are we collaborating or flying solo?… Susan Cain for the NY Times on how society (business, education, popular culture) is more and more group or teamwork driven. “Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.” Cain argues that this trend is often problematic where creative people in most fields are often introverts and benefit from privacy and freedom of interruption. Cain sites the example of Apple with Steve Jobs’s renowned magnetism and the tendency to overlook the introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled more or less alone on their innovative projects. Our humble view falls in those beautiful, forgotten shades of gray… teamwork is often critical for ideas, strategy development, refinement, bringing concepts to fruition while individual effort usually and efficiently produces more depth and truly innovative and unfiltered thinking. Like that great painter said… “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible” (Picasso).
