Creativity strikes (the right keys) again

Here’s a great example of creative people coming up with an entertaining and effective solution to a stubborn human problem. What’s next? Cars designed to exercise your arms, legs and core while you drive?

Creativity that reaches for the moon also saves the Earth

The year 1969 was an important one for the chronically dissatisfied. That was the year in which the Apollo 11 mission set humans down for the first time in the silvery dust of Earth’s satellite, allowing the grumblers among us to grouse for 40 years, if not forevermore, that “they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t cure the common cold.”

Or make a ballpoint pen that doesn’t glob. Or dental floss that doesn’t shred. Etc.

And yeah, ballpoint pens still glob, usually on the most important checks and letters I have to write. But it’s also true that the scientific research generated by the space program has resulted in a ridiculously varied collection of new or greatly improved products, from microlasers and breast-biopsy technology to better athletic shoes and enriched baby food.

There are so many of these products and processes and so many people who think funding the space program is the moral equivalent of buying a mink coat with the money from the Salvation Army kettle that NASA has felt obliged to justify its own existence by putting up a page on its website listing all the things it’s developed that benefit everyday people: (http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html)

It’s too bad they’ve had to do this out of defensiveness instead of pride. Back in the ‘60s, everyone was so excited about space exploration that they were even proud of Tang, for god’s sake, a kind of astronaut orange juice that had to be the worst-tasting instant drink since Linus in Peanuts dipped a brown crayon in hot water and called it cocoa.

I remember, as a kid, being thrilled when my father, a doctor employed by a pharmaceutical-research firm, brought home a tiny bottle of the banana-flavored pellets his company had developed to nourish the monkeys sent up in test space-flights. They tasted like something that had been lying on the bottom of the produce bin for three weeks – and could break your teeth. But they were space food!

Forty-five years ago, there was nothing cooler.

This year, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing has revived the debate about the worth of our space research, a debate that has alternately shrunk and expanded America’s space program over the last three decades. A lot of folks still think paying for rocket ships and all-terrain Mars rovers means taking bread and milk from the mouths of starving children. 

And maybe NASA is so underfunded now that it can’t do decent public relations about its own successes. But here’s the message the American public needs to get: Investing our tax money in creative and innovative research is like teaching ourselves to fish. When we do that, we’re funding the gaining of knowledge and the development of skills that will let us make life better for billions of people – not just for a day or two, like handing out food, but permanently.

It’s the same as making a long-term investment, rather than living paycheck to paycheck – we’ll never get out from under unless we do.  

There will always be suffering and want and inefficiency unless we keep underwriting programs that find better means of curing these ills. So we have to keep donating peanut butter and penicillin and water purifiers and working on making even better food and medicines and technologies.

Maybe we’ll end up with a globless pen, too.

More about newspapers and creativity

 Reader Richard Boothroyd has this to say about yesterday’s post:

“I think that is a pretty naive opinion that newspapers are failing because of a lack of passion and creativity. Newspapers/print media are failing because of technology (theirs is old) staffing (too much) overhead, (bloggers have little) and competition.

“The model of the newsprint town crier is not even a good one anymore since the medium is not “Green”. This is a business problem not a passion problem and NO…”when people want something they will pay for it” is just not true. You are looking at the demise of Northern Ohio Live as we speak.”

Well, Mr. Boothroyd, perhaps I didn’t explain myself adequately.

First, I’m not talking simply about newspapers, but about the news industry as a whole. Newspapers are in the deepest and, I fear, most lasting trouble, but none of the media are doing all that well at the moment because of the economy-related plunge in paid advertising and the steady decline in subscriptions. Those industry-wide revenue losses have indeed started killing off publications, the Rocky Mountain News and Northern Ohio Live included.

But even though some of the industry’s financial problems are – like yours and mine – due to world banking problems beyond its control, the root cause of print news’ collapse is most certainly a lack of creativity. Here’s what I mean: People in the newspaper business sensed about 30 years ago that computer communication was the way of the future. They knew they were failing to attract younger readers and that their faithful subscribers were going to die off. But instead of putting those two facts together and working hard to come up with a whole new creative news medium, they made two huge mistakes – they didn’t get serious soon enough about using the Internet and they all threw their energies into the same doomed strategy of trying to jazz up their paper pages with what they hoped was bright, hip, short-attention-span-friendly content that teens and twentysomethings would like.

Ignoring the Internet was catastrophically unimaginative, especially with the cost of newsprint soaring. So was the youth-ifying of their pages, because even though it seemed creative on the surface, it wasn’t - each newspaper basically just copied what the others were trying, including Friday entertainment tabloids, high-school sections, women’s sections (back to the future!!), endless collections of U.S.A. Today-style news briefs and huge photos and illustrations. And to what end? Young people stayed glued to their TVs and Sony Walkmen and VCRs and PCs and iPods.

I’ve worked for five different newspapers over those same 30 years and observed a lot of others and almost no news management in that time demonstrated the foresight and innovative spirit to commit real resources and effort to developing digital news content. Publishers and editors kept saying they couldn’t figure out how to make it pay - and then one day, they woke up and discovered that the electronic toys all the kids liked to play with were, in fact, going to be the new information media for the whole planet and, worse, all their advertising, their lifeblood, had gone over to the Web.   

That was absolutely a failure of passion and creativity, a failure of daring. You can’t sit still in any business, you can’t cover your eyes – if you don’t have the zeal and the imagination to look ahead and change constantly, you’ll find you’ve been left behind. That’s what happened to newspapers and that’s what happened to Cleveland and Detroit and Buffalo and a host of other cities in the Midwest where I live. We can see the results of getting too complacent – and then too scared – to change, all around us here.

With apologies to “When Harry Met Sally,” newspapers are the steel of the early 2000s. Like Big Steel, print on paper will pass away, except for small, boutique publishers of specialty books and magazines, and the news industry will spend the next 30 years trying to leapfrog into a future it could have anticipated and been ready for if it had just had the courage to experiment.  

I have worked in too many newsrooms not to have seen what the political realities were. Real risk-taking - the initiative to create something unique to that paper and that community, something deeply rooted in content of substance and excellence – was discouraged. Managements wanted to try only what seemed to be working someplace else.

So newpapers and magazines and TV and radio stations have become corporatized clones of one another. And like clones of living creatures, they are weak, shortlived versions of the real thing. It’s just worse for the print side of the industry because it has dully clung to an outmoded medium.

Journalistic creativity isn’t just about the writing and the pictures and the design, Mr. Boothroyd. It’s about the business, too.

A truly fair opportunity to excel at creativity

Where does a 14-year-old get the creativity and and aptitude to prove the co-evolutionary relationship between two different species? 

From nature and her own brain, of course – but good teachers help, says Michele Glidden,  director of science education programs for the Society for Science and the Public, which co-presents the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The 2009 fair, which was held May 10 through last Friday in Reno, Nev., drew 1,500 high-school science students from over 50 nations.

The 14-year-old in question, Tara Adiseshan from Charlottesville, Va., was one of three $50,000 grand-prize winners at this year’s fair. But about one-third of all the participants took home awards for projects demonstrating independence of thought, independent research, creativity and innovation – qualities the society and the fair try to encourage, Glidden said.

The way the fair does that is not by steering students toward particular fields or topics, but through what Glidden calls “a great structure and system” of local school and community fairs supported by teachers who guide their students and help them find lab-study opportunities and summer research programs.

“We attempt to stay unbiased,” she said. Instead of influencing their project choices, ”We  provide the forum to recognize and celebrate their successes.”

But one area in which the society and fair would like to exercise some clout  is underserved communities, whose youngsters may not have access to well-trained teachers and fully equipped facilities. Glidden says the society has just begun a new fellowship program for teachers in reduced-lunch or Title IX schools. The society reached out to teachers in underserved communities last fall and, by January 2009, had about 200 applicants, between six and nine of whom have been named fellows.

They’ll receive scientific training and the resources they need to coach students through independent-study projects, Glidden says. “Teachers are really begging for that kind of resource and knowledge.”

The program may help give a more equal chance of success – at the fair and in their careers - to students who don’t come from cities abounding in scientific-research institutions and money. Yet the fair’s history shows that winners don’t always hail from obvious centers of scientific excellence such as Boston – last year, one top winner came from Mississippi, Glidden says.  

“Fair” is a word they take literally at the society: Judging winners on the quality of the project alone is one of their key principles. This year, the highest prizes were earned not only by 14-year-old Tara, but also by 16-year-old Olivia Schwob of – yes – Boston and by 17-year-old Li Boynton of Bellaire, Texas: all girls. And the 2009 event was not the first in which three young women – or three young men, or a mix - have made up the circle of grand-prize winners.

“My final group of judges, when I told them they had picked all women, they weren’t aware they had done it,” Glidden recalls. 

Many of these young people go on to become scientific thinkers and researchers, she says. In fact, the 60-year-old Intel Science Talent Search, the society’s and Intel’s annual science-research competition for high-school seniors, has seen seven of its participants go on to win Nobel Prizes.

But the real point of the fair and the talent search, Glidden says, is to benefit students educationally “no matter what they do”  with their lives.

Innovator-in-Chief

It’s hard to change things. Particularly if the things you’re trying to change are huge.

Part of what gives me some hope for the future – in spite of how grim life is at the moment for most us, financially – is the fact that the United States has an executive leader who’s actively trying to improve the nation and the world by changing what we do and how we do it.

  Though he faces enormous tasks, from our hurting economy, environment and international standing to our ailing infrastructure, educational and health-care systems,  Barack Obama seems eager to get going and restructure all the desperately tangled, outmoded policies and procedures that make the U.S. inefficient and less successful in some ways than other advanced nations.  

I’m hoping Obama’s example will encourage the rest of the population to be brave, too, and stop clinging to ways that don’t work. If the U.S.’s long, long season of social and economic paralysis changes to one of imagination and daring, our entrepreneurs of all kinds will step up and supply the ideas we need to redesign the poorly functioning parts of our country. 

One thing’s sure: If we’re going to become innovators ourselves and understand what needs changing and why, we’re going to need a lot of information. Take a step in that direction with us and visit Geniocity.com’s blog pages on Thursday, April 16,  to find out how the growing revolution in wind energy may be one way to remake America and Earth.

Wind of Change – A Geniocity.com project

It’s Geniocity.com’s mission to expand the global conversation about creativity and innovation.

To engage our readers in that discussion and offer them a more comprehensive view of what’s happening on the creative frontier, the Geniocity.com blog team plans to periodically select an important issue  that each writer will examine from the unique perspective of his or her particular field. Like an architectural charrette, each of these group projects will present a collection of our individual takes on a complex topic for you to absorb and respond to through posted comments on our blog pages.  

On this coming Thursday, April 16, I hope you’ll join us for Wind of Change, a look at the cutting edge of wind energy, a renewable power source growing in popularity and impact around the world and in your own community. You’ll find insights on aspects of wind power including next steps in technology and policy, the business future, economic and environmental effects, legal questions, design developments and planning.

We’re looking forward to your participation in a lively debate over the pros and cons and all the gray areas in between, so don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and ideas.

Thanks, and see you there.

The day’s yield: A clump of joys

Two sales! Plus, two new artist/creators coming to the store and some new bloggers joining us after the holidays! 

Wow. All of a sudden, Geniocity.com is enjoying a good-event cluster. I’ve always wondered why developments seem to clump up like that, the way cars always do on an otherwise uncrowded highway.

Whatever the reason, it’s nice to have some positive changes to report. And on top of all that, I managed to conquer a little technology yesterday, with the help of several tech-support saints. The Geniocity Shop now functions properly and my bookkeeping software and my bank are talking to each other online – and all it cost me was ulcer symptoms, two near brain collapses and a set of shorted-out nerves.  I look a lot like Wile E. Coyote after the Acme TNT detonator fried him.

And yet, I and my software-based business functions apparently survived, and maybe even improved. Buddha make a miracle!

You’ll find out soon about the cool and quite different creative works we’ll be adding to the store. And with the planned additions to our blog roster, Geniocity’s range of information about creativity and innovation will both broaden and deepen. Already, ‘09 is looking like a step up from ‘08.

May the economy cooperate.

It must be bug season

I’ve been staggering around with a cold the last couple of days. My computer’s been hit with something, too, though I have no idea what it is yet.

I’m hoping we haven’t reached a stage of technological evolution where computers and their owners can come down with the same germs.

But whatever we have, my digital system and I, it’s affecting us in different ways. My computer has taken to its virtual bed and refuses to access certain addresses, as if it were some Victorian lady of refined society who suspects she has been slighted by some of her acquaintance and will no longer go calling to those homes where she is not sincerely welcomed. Her software consequently has the vapors.
I, on the other hand, being merely a laborer in her mansard-roofed house of microchips, may not lie abed genteelly flattened by my ailment, but must carry out my duties regardless of my weakened state and stuffy nose.

I had dismally resigned myself to operating in something like third gear yesterday morning and was succumbing to a last few moments of anguished immobility before flogging myself out of the sack, when I was suddenly struck by such a profound fed-uppedness at the stagnation of everything – the economy, my finances, the things in my house I can’t afford to fix, my business plans, me – that I arose from my mattress as if a spring had popped right under me, inexplicably determined to change some things I’ve been putting off out of sheer inertia and cowardice.

I had not realized before now that Disgust was one of the Muses.

But even though what it moved me to perform was not exactly creativity and innovation, what I finally got around to today – the first steps of reorganizing and redirecting some vital parts of my business – will allow me to be creative more effectively in future, if for no other reason than I won’t be fretting about the reorganization chores instead of thinking up ideas.

I may, however, still be debugging the computer. And sneezing.