Is technology innovating art or is it the other way around?

Innovation in California: Backwards and forwards

I have mixed feelings about California today. It’s hard to imagine a state so progressive in other ways choosing to constitutionally ban marriage between adults of the same sex.

I believe that situation will change for the better, and quickly. But even though it has –  temporarily, I hope – messed up on the moral/legal front, California  is still in the vanguard on other kinds of policy. Specifically, a few weeks ago, Gov. Arnold Schwartzenegger announced a plan to make open-source digital textbooks available for free to California’s high-school students.  

This is a great idea that should be expanded to the university level, where textbooks can cost students hundreds – or more – of dollars every year. On both the secondary and college level, students and their families often suffer these huge charges because publishers unnecessarily update or customize books, forcing students to buy new copies instead of lower-cost used ones. Some universities have already made the move to digital textbooks, helped by the likes of Amazon.com, but if states including California would make free digital resources available to their entire public-education systems, the playing field could get a little more level for families who can’t pay the price of the learning  their children deserve.

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned. 

Stormy weather

Somewhere in our nation, a little guy with a spear and magic helmet must be waving his stubby arms around and shouting “Storms! North winds bwow! South winds bwow! Typhoons! Huwwicanes! SMOG!”

Whoever that little guy is – and I could name a name – he sure has turned American life into a not-so-comic opera. In his dim quest to “kill de wabbit,” he and his cast of cartoon sidekicks have brought down disasters of every kind on the unprotected heads of those they were supposed to serve.

And that’s us.  So what have we been through? The rise of a feudal economy as the unchecked privileged grab away the few resources of the poor and middle class. An invented, pointless war with thousands of killed and maimed. The fanning of our enemies’ hatred and our friends’ anger. Our nation indentured to Big Oil.  The environment in a death spiral amid an official culture of defiant ignorance. A major city drowned and destroyed through ineptitude.  Our infrastructure disintegrating.  Our money devalued. And now, a tectonic shift in the banking industry as its own greed and foolishness dissolve the bedrock it was built on.     

Earthquakes and huwwicanes, indeed – literally and figuratively. The flick some of us way-inlanders got from Ike’s tail in the last couple of days was like a physical reminder of how vulnerable we all are to catastrophes that once seemed exotically unlikely.

So this is where we stand:  in more desperate need than ever of courageous, innovative people with the skills to think and experiment our way out of this deadly fix.  The problem with crises is that they make so many people want to just stay down and stay put. They’re terrified to try the very thing that could save them. And that thing is creative risk.

Though there’s little optimism now and less money, we have enormous opportunity - and we simply can’t waste it.  The definition of “entrepreneur” is someone willing to take risk in order to reap profits, to have the guts to reach for the glory, but it can’t be limited to business. It has to be about everything in our lives. And the ideas have to come from all of us.

We have to imagine and we have to try smart new things. And when the story about the little guy in the magic helmet concludes with the question, “Well, what didja expect in an opera? A happy ending?”,  we have to say: Yes! 

And then create one.

The truth about greed

I’ve been reading someone else’s blog. It’s good for me to come out on the porch once in a while for air.

The particular blog I was scanning last night is called How to Change the World. It belongs to a West Coast venture capitalist named Guy Kawasaki. You may have heard of him – he’s not only involved in outfits such as Garage Technology Ventures, but also writes a column for Entrepreneur Magazine and has come out with a number of books including “The Art of the Start.” 

He’s clearly a very smart and unspeakably successful man, from his Stanford and UCLA education to his scalpel of a wit. Just read (and weep over) his two posts from January 2006, the Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists and the Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs, to discover the truth about the game of getting funded. Like me, you may immediately be visited by an urge to lie down on – or better, under – your bed and come out long enough to put in just the few late-nightly hours as a janitor that’ll keep you in Cheetos and Netflicks for the rest of your numbed, thwarted life.

But even as I noted his creativity as a writer, I was gobsmacked by the realization that venture capitalism  – at least as practiced by the firms I’ve heard of - is actually anti-innovation.

You heard me. They all claim to be investing in and encouraging innovation, but they’re not, they can’t be  - because all they care about is making a bazillion dollars. What that means is, they really aren’t looking for the most interesting ideas, the ones that could have the farthest-reaching good effects on life, society or the planet, but only on the most lucrative ones.

And what makes something lucrative these days is imitation. Yes, imitation – the cost-effective, mass duplication of someone else’s original, creative and successful idea.

That’s why all the venture capitalists are looking for another Google. Just as all the publishers are looking for the next ”Harry Potter” series or ”Chicken Soup” franchise. And just as all the Hollywood producers are looking – and have looked every single year since moving pictures were invented -  for the next cookie-cutter version of the suburban-family sitcom.

When by some fluke, someone invents something truly new or different that seizes everyone’s imagination and becomes - often unexpectedly – a commercial phenomenon,  all the buck-hounds want to do is copy it and cash in. So no one really searches out and carefully fosters new and unique writing talent the way Max Perkins did long ago at Scribners. No one in Hollywood tries any really daring content – only the little independents have the guts and inspiration to walk on the edge where the material rewards are dubious, but the impact on minds can be huge.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re talking about: The true “next thing” will actually come, as it almost always does, from a person or couple of people with nothing but imagination and nerve, who somehow manage to create their idea and win attention for it. And as soon as it catches on, the money-worlders will be rushing around trying to find something just like it to exploit, instead of trying to help other creative people invent another true “next thing.”

That’s not changing the world. That’s arresting its development. 

I’m not saying that those who do attract venture capital are without creativity themselves. But their ideas have to fit such a narrow definition of desirability – software tech, biotech, $50 million in four years - that only a very few of them ever win support. 

Think of all the other kinds of ideas that will be ignored or lost because the guys with all the billions have tunnel-vision. 

Please. I would, but it makes me ill.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Questions to ponder. People ask me why I started Geniocity.com and what makes me think it’s worthy of their attention and support. Well, there are a few things I’d like to know, too:

1) Creativity and innovation are the acknowledged characteristics of the new knowledge economy. … So why is it so hard to get money people interested in start-ups that aren’t the same old thing? 

2) College educators are busily teaching entrepreneurship to budding artists of all kinds. The arts generate billions of dollars for regional economies around the nation. … So why do all the start-up grants seem to be for technology companies? 

3) Clearly, reading about the arts and creativity has never been more important to society that it is right now. …So why are America’s ailing newspapers getting rid of their arts critics?

4) Why do people of no talent, ethics or imagination so often rise to the top?

5) Why does everybody else obey them like sheep?

6) And why, for god’s sake, don’t any of today’s coffeeshops sell pie?

I ask you.    

Where we’re going

It was like this: My business partner and I were lost.

Actually lost, somewhere among the fields and woods of Northeast Ohio. We had driven east of Cleveland to a picturesque country village for a meeting a couple of hours earlier and, on our way back to the city, I had taken a wrong turn.

And now we were both a little wild-eyed, me clutching the wheel as we looped around the two-lane, blacktopped roads on a cloudy summer afternoon, staring hopefully at signposts and at masticating cows, neither of which gave us any helpful information. The signs stated only route numbers – not west or north or anything – and as far as I knew, cows didn’t grow moss.

We needed to be at another meeting, it was getting later and later and neither Dan nor I had any idea which direction we were going.

We were both rattled to begin with, which is probably why I missed the turn. Our meeting in the village had been with a twentysomething designer we hoped could help us with the web site that was to be the core of our new business. But instead of offering us design ideas, this young person had spent an hour and half telling us why he thought our business idea wouldn’t work.

Our reactions had started at surprised and defensive, intensified to dismayed and were building into anguished fury as I aimed the car for – I thought – Cleveland. Deep in agitated discussion, we scarcely noticed that we had traded a view of ruburban yuppie chateaux for 360 degrees worth of sugar maples and late-season corn.

Who the heck did this guy think he was? We absolutely believed in our idea, in the goals of our plan, in the viability of our services and products as moneymakers and good influences on society. Yes, we were first-time entrepreneurs – an arts journalist/creative writer/singer and an arts journalist/artist/teacher – but we knew our fields, we saw a real need for what we wanted to offer and many professional people we trusted had said they liked our concept. What gall this character had, telling us we were wrong.

But what if he was right? He couldn’t be. But … what if he was?

We didn’t really believe he was right. Not really and truly. Yet even before we realized that we had lost our way, we had lost our confidence.

Off course, unnerved and alone (not counting the cows) – if that car ride wasn’t a metaphor for a big part of the entrepreneurial experience in general, I’ll eat my annotated Shakespeare.

On the long, strange trip to owning and running a creative enterprise, I’ve constantly rocketed up and down between bone-deep discouragement and euphoria, but that frantic drive was both the lowest moment and the literal turning point in my attitude towards my project.

I learned a lot about myself in the two horrible hours it took us to make what should have been a 45-minute jaunt – I mean other than that I could use a GPS in my car.
First, I found I was able to get back on track by using common sense and looking for familiar landmarks. Second, I realized that, even though all the conflicting input Dan and I had been given over months of seeking opinions from different experts had been informative in some way, what we had to do now was trust our own judgment and heed only the advice that helped. Naysayers could sleep wid da cows.

And third, I figured out that business isn’t that different from arts or journalism or raising kids or working with humans in any of a zillion other ways you can think of. Everyone you have to deal with thinks his way is the right way. Many people will try to talk you out of, and even prevent you from trying, your way. The overwhelming majority of people don’t have the imagination to understand your way until you show them a working example.

And since finding the road up and out of my pasture-ized personal wilderness, I have decided this: Above all, don’t let anyone talk you out of being innovative. A great many people are comfortable only with what they know and have seen over and over again, but that’s not how humans make progress. I mean, are you reading this in charcoal pictographs on a cave wall?

So welcome to Geniocity.com, where we encourage those who dare to think up new ways of working, expressing themselves and solving problems. From our initial focus on entrepreneurism to the broader information on creativity and innovation that we plan to bring you in time, we hope you’ll find this site helpful, entertaining and inspiring.
And just wait ‘til you hear what we’ve been going through to get this far ….