Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it. When I was composing [the opera] Anna Nicole, I was up at 5 or 6am, and worked through until lunch. The afternoon is the worst time for creativity.
Source : The Guardian
Why does traditional brainstorming often fail to produce breakthrough ideas?Most brainstorming and idea generation efforts yield poor and unactionable results for three key reasons. The first is because managers rarely know how or where to direct employee’s creative energy. The result is much wasted energy, hundreds of useless ideas, and unfortunately, few ideas that are truly worthy of of pursuit. Consider the typical pattern. In most firms, when employees are asked to come up with new ideas they are not directed to focus on specific outcomes; rather, they are asked for ideas to improve the company’s product in general (functions, ergonomics, fit and finish, distribution and packaging), leaving the direction for improvement open to interpretation. In the absence if a specific target, employees in turn focus on what they themselves want to improve rather than on what customers want to see improved
Alessi knows that if all his new products are successful, the company has been too conservative and has stayed away from the borderline. This is not good, because it opens the field to competitors. So the company periodically pursues more-radical projects. And even when these efforts apparently fail (proposing products that are too extreme-beyond the borderline), that failure is the revealing moment in which the firm finally sees where the borderline was and is in the best position to make a breakthrough with the next project, before and better than its competitors.
What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determining elements and combining them. – Karl Gerstner
“It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.”
— History of Western Philosophy (Routledge Classics) – by Bertrand Russell
“Now of course Hoffa is a union boss and he would say that, wouldn’t he. But the point he raises is nevertheless sobering. Not only is patriotism a completely outmoded concept for major technology companies, but so also is the idea that these corporations have any wider social responsibility to the societies which provide them with the skilled and educated people who make them so innovative and profitable. Welcome to Tom Friedman’s flat world.”
culture,economics,policy, usa
Source :The Guardian
“The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either..”
environment,innovation, uk
Source : BBC
“Why would the Treasury want more longer-term debt? Let’s think of an analogy. Imagine that you had two loans: a 30-year mortgage fixed at 3% and a 1-year loan at 0.5% that you have to roll over annually. Although that one-year loan is cheaper now, you know that in a couple of years it will cost you more than 3% to continue to roll it over — and your spending habit won’t allow you to pay it off. As a result, it makes sense to consolidate that short-term loan into your mortgage if you are able.”
culture,economics,policy,usa
Source :The Atlantic Magazine
“We were thinking: ‘what would be a way forward, how could Europe define a strategic route for laser power production to take advantage of these developments?’ And that was the kernel of Hiper.”
environment,innovation,uk
Source : BBC
“Now studies on a group of children trained to use a “mental abacus” suggest the technique frees mathematics from its usual dependence on language.”
Asia,Mathmatics,Method,thinking
Source : New Scientist
Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.
– Kaushik
Collected Reading 