Picking Flowers, Collecting Trash

I was a daydreamer drifter when I was about six years old, and that may not have been a good thing.

Back in 1956 in Cleveland Heights children could walk the mile alone to school through the neighborhood and I would explore on the way home. Every yard was a mystery and every house was to be investigated. That was at least 50 houses by estimate now. I bet I knew every stone and brick, every crevice over that year.

Another interest I had was gardens, and the flowers in them were apparently for sharing because I would bring one or two home everyday throughout the springtime to my mother, Sue. She probably was trying her best to curtail that behavior, but I finally won her over one day with a big bunch of tuplips from our side yard by the driveway.

The best outdoor activity at the time, in my six-year-old estimation, was trash day. This was not garbage day, but once a week people put clearance from basements and attics on their lawns for pickup. In order to get a head start on the crew coming by truck, I left the house somewhere around 6 a.m. in the dark to pick through the treasures. I came home with assortments of things I would put in my upstairs glassed-in porch that was my personal space for thinking and working. Sue, and my dad Rodger, really wanted me to stop going out of the house before they were awake, but I just could not see the logic in that - how would I get these special items if I did not get outside before the trash collectors!

Life as a child was an adventure always and it still makes me happy to this day to take simple steps to observe the wonderful world around me and all of its mysteries.

Innovation = Dollars?

To continue on the creativity vs innovation theme I found this web site that says: "Think more creatively ~ innovate more profitably!"

So the web site, called Jenni, says it can help you and your company get your arms around this: "Idea management is a structured innovation process for capturing ideas from across a large group of people - such as your employees - and evaluating those ideas in order to identify the most promising. Jenni is a combination of software (which runs on the web) and human support that provides idea management through ideas campaigns.
An Ideas campaign is a structured process we have developed for idea management. Moreover, we believe it is the most effective, most sustainable and most motivational approach to idea management available. That's why we developed it and have used it as a model for Jenni idea management.

Honestly, the thought of having this kind of bureaucracy imposed around my idea generation makes me not want to do it in an environment this structured where someone is going to put it through hoops for profit. The question for me still remains - how do you define creativity vs innovation - because I do not want making money be related to whether something is innovative or not.

Innovation - Think Strategically

I was looking around at what people are saying about innovation and I saw this - it fits with what the corporate space should think about - from Fast Company:

Many companies that muffle innovation make some very simple mistakes:

1) Innovation (or new business development or corporate venturing or whatever you call it) is a flavor-of-the-month sort of thing. There's no consistent advocate; the process moves in fits and starts, and just as you are actually learning something, an urgent crisis causes the program to be shut down.

2) Launching a major new business is seen to be the only legitimate goal of innovation. Sure, that's great, but my colleagues and I have learned that the real benefit of innovation is often to keep your company on top in fast-moving core markets. Other benefits include patentable ideas, development of innovative people, spin-offs with economic value, and valuable learning that can lead to a success the next time around.

3) The role middle managers play in the innovation process is ignored. These folks and their networks are often the first to hit the chopping block in a corporate downsizing, but without them, innovation comes to a crashing halt.

4) Conventional disciplines -- financial benefits, career rewards, performance reviews, promotions -- are applied to uncertain new businesses. Our thesis in a forthcoming book is that established companies have most of what they need to innovate and grow, except for the right disciplines.

The Future of Creativity and Innovation

I am interested in creativity and innovation and where the two intersect. So I plan to cover this topic for a while. First I looked at a definition of creativity and Wikipedia, of course, provided a good start.

Wikipedia says, in part, "Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Okay, now to the section on innovation that compares the two, "It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context. In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process."

With opportunities to be innovative in today's world, it is interesting to note that companies are careful to define ownership of innovations by employed staff - so that the creator of an innovative idea within that environment really does not own this idea or concept, no matter how original it may be. Unless these companies begin to provide equity into these ideas, more and more innovators will work freelance and the fabric of the creative and innovative team environment will decline.

NYC: An Amazing Web of Movement

I love NYC and am interested in how it changes from an anthropology perspective. Here is an interested story: a Wired reporter covered the increase in ridership on the NYC subway and Long Island Railway. Alexander Lew says:

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced this week that both the subway and the Long Island Railroad had a significant increase in riders. The subway carried 1.56 billion people in 2007, an increase of 4.2% over 2006's ridership, maintaining the New York Subway's spot in the top three busiest subways in the world. Tokyo's subway system carries about 2.65 billion passengers each year and Moscow estimates 2.47 billion rides are taken on its metro per year. Long Island Railroad saw a 4.9% increase in riders but also had a record monthly on-time performance with 96.5% trains arriving on time in January 2008 (on time is defined as within six minutes of the schedule). Both the LIRR and the subway haven't seen this number of riders in decades. One major issue that the New York subway will face in the coming years is its capacity. The MTA's Rider Report Card showed that many passengers (especially on numbered lines, which use narrower and shorter trains than lettered lines) would like to have "adequate room to board during rush hour." The MTA reported that many of the lines cannot add anymore trains. Expanding platforms has been considered. One project that will relieve traffic off the Lexington Lines, which carry 1.3 million daily passengers, is the Second Avenue Subway (opens 2014). The initial segment from 96th Street to 63rd Avenue (where the trains will connect to the Q Broadway Express) will cost $3.83 billion. But in the mean time, the MTA encourages people to use the lettered lines.