Gary Hamel on intrapreneurship (spinning off a new company from within):

Make sure they look at the world as a reservoir of competencies that they can build into their own new business models. When you set up a new unit, be careful that you steer a line between two paths: totally isolating it, which is fine if it isn't at all related to what you're doing, and giving it a bear hug, where you hold on to it so tight that it can never escape the gravitational pull of old beliefs. Never be afraid of the new business's competing with the old business, because if you do, you'll be paralyzed. I think what companies of all sizes are going to have to do is to create internal markets for ideas and that's a lot easier to do in small companies than in large ones, partly because the large companies have greater geographic differences and bureaucracies.

 
A clever connection between the morning weather forecast and your morning piece of toast...

It's the engineering equivalent of a haiku: Robin Southgate's Java toaster, a device he assembled as part of his final year design project at Brunel University in England. The toaster dials a freephone number to get the weather forecast and burns the appropriate symbol on a piece of toast. And ... that's it.

(via Adland)

 
Networking to the nth degree requires a little help from your friends. Fast Company profiles some of the Friendster-like apps -- Spoke, LinkedIn, Ryze -- for business mixing and matching.

If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We're not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers. As in love, the best business links often come through people you know: The best hires are usually referrals, and the best way to get in the door for a sales call is through an introduction from a mutual friend. Until now, however, we've been limited to calling on people in our immediate circle. Social networking software offers the tantalizing opportunity to reach out not just to folks in your own little black book, but also to the friends and associates of all those people (as well as their friends and associates).

Looking for a new job? Post your profile, search your network for contacts, and ask those friends of friends of friends to help you find a match. Need an introduction to a venture capitalist? Get that colleague's former college roommate to hook you up. It's a tantalizing notion: Play this game right, and the dreaded cold call becomes obsolete.

 
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. - Nietzsche

 
Photographs of signs that transcend their objectivity to reveal our humanity. Signs of Life.

 
It's the eBay of unwanted stuff. Instead of toss and buy, Freecycle.

One rule: everything posted must be free. Whether it's a chair, a fax machine, piano, or an old door to be given away, it can be posted on the network. Or, maybe you're looking to acquire something yourself? Respond to the posting directly and you just might get it. After that it is up to the giver to set up a pickup time for passing on the treasure.

 
One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks. ... The entire Internet is a gigantic, sprawling agreement between companies to intercommunicate freely. How Internet Infrastructure Works.

 
Meet Tom Strasthle, a Wisconsin designer who failed to create the logo for the Department of Homeland Security, but ended up designing the infamous Homeland Security Advisory System, "to let the general public know how close they were to dying."

(Thanks Clay)

 
"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." --Heraclitus, philosopher (c. 540-470 BCE)

 
Greek mythology has never been so colourful and fun to learn. Winged Sandals is a collaboration between Melbourne University and the Australian Broadcasting Company with the purpose of sharing the rich stories of classical mythology with young 6-12 year old children. Gods, mortals and monsters are all described and some of the better known stories -- How Apollo got his Oracle and Orpheus and the Underworld, among others -- are animated in lively and sometimes musical Flash vignettes. Says the site's creative director Rosie Allimonos, "I chose this subject partly because I knew that the stories of myth would inspire animators but also to use the latest technologies of digital storytelling to let the stories speak to web audiences and inspire thirst for the classics in a new generation."

 
The Audiovisual Environment Suite (AVES) is a set of five interactive systems which allow people to create and perform abstract animation and synthetic sound in real time. Each environment is an experimental attempt to design an interface which is supple and easy to learn, yet can also yield interesting, infinitely variable and personally expressive performances in both the visual and aural domains. Ideally, these systems permit their interactants to engage in a flow state of pure experience.

The AVES systems inhabit a domain at the juncture of art, design, and the engineering of tools and instruments. As artworks, they extend an established Twentieth century tradition in which artworks are themselves generative systems for other media. As a set of tools, the AVES work represents a vision for creative endeavor on the computer, in which uniquely ephemeral dynamic media blossom from a close collaboration between a system's user and designer.

(via augustdiva)

 
Big ideas do not need big ideamakers. And the fundamental difference between ideation and creation.

Bigger does not mean better. Some figure that a large company is quite capable of generating ideas simply because with so many people the odds are on their side. Surely a 2000-person company, they reason, can generate more good ideas than a 20-person one could. Wrong! Two reasons: Firstly, communication, which is key, is considerably more difficult, segregated and certainly more indirect in the larger organization. Secondly, most employees of large companies are cogs in the machine (whether they want to be or not) and they know it. They punch the clock, do their job, don’t rock the boat or offer anything beyond their job description.

Barry Base, a columnist for Canada’s Strategy magazine used a restaurant metaphor to describe finding an ad agency: “Let’s hit the biggest restaurant in town? Why not; it must be good, it’s BIG! Well, it may employ hundreds of cooks and waiters and bartenders, but only one of them will sauté your chicken or refill your breadbasket or mix your martini. Your problem is knowing which one is doing your stuff.”

The reason this is a problem is because it is wasteful for a client, or in Base’s example a diner, to have to pay for staff and accessories that are not used for their particular project or meal.

The scale of an idea is not in proportion with the scale of the workforce needed to generate it. That is, an idea is the result of quality of minds, not quantity of minds. A small, diverse group can think of a big idea just as – or probably better – than a big like-minded group could. This means that a client must find the organization with the best environment and the best people for ideation. However, most clients do not bother to do this. They do not seek out a team of creative generalists; people arranged in an ideative environment. If only they realized that the dynamic of the environment is the real secret to ideation success.

Creation, on the other hand, is proportionately scaleable - meaning it often requires more people and equipment for bigger jobs. As the project scope increases so too will the number of people needed to service it. In this case, a client needs to select the best creative supplier who is also competent at the full scope of the project. This is where clients get sucked in to thinking bigger is better because there will always be capacity if the project grows.

 
Although, sadly, it points to the latest McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" advertising campaign as an example of creative excellence, this article in China Daily about the Chinese creative industry is an interesting read. It offers a glimpse at some of the creative challenges present in this emerging commercial superpower.

China's wildly diverse consumer landscape is the result of economic imbalance. It is a big headache for advertising firms who must work out how to vie for and hold the attention of a vast scope of consumers with starkly varying standards of living long enough to communicate new brand ideas.

(via Cup of Java)

 
Scary to some, intriguing to others, artificial intelligence is developing at a quick pace. It's even, according to this article - The machine that invents, learning from its own mistakes. In this case, the AI is the aptly named Creativity Machine, a computer program by Imagination Engines president and CEO Stephen Thaler that is credited with having written more music than any composer in the world, invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush, discovered substances harder than diamonds, and coined 1.5 million new English words. The secret: tickle the program with random activity to effectively establish new network connections, new ideas.

"Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion." You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said. Human brains are also noisy places, said Dr. Walter J. Freeman, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. A debate has raged for half a century about what the brain does with noise.

Many biologists see noise as just a nuisance or a necessary evil, Freeman said. The brain devotes many neurons to the same task so it can swamp out that random activity, those scientists argue. But Freeman subscribes to an alternative theory - that noise is essential for the brain to function properly. Noise provides variability that allows organisms to adapt to new situations, he said.

(via Pure Content)