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Scientists are much more likely to produce innovative research when using long-term grants that allow them exceptional freedom in the lab, according to a new study co-written by MIT economists. The work shows that biologists whose funding encourages them to take risks and tolerates initial research failures wind up producing about twice as many highly influential papers as some peers whose funding is dependent upon meeting closely defined, short-term research targets. “If you want people to branch out in new directions, then it’s important to provide for their long-term horizons, to give them time to experiment and potentially fail,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and an author of the study.

How to encourage big ideas

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/creative-research-1209.html
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Creative class - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Creative Class is a socioeconomic class that economist and social scientist Richard Florida , a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto , identifies as a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the United States . Florida describes the Creative Class as comprising 40 million workers—30 percent of the U.S. workforce—and breaks the class into two broad sections, derived from Standard Occupational Classification System codes: Super-Creative Core: This group comprises about 12 percent of all U.S. jobs. It includes a wide range of occupations (e.g. science, engineering, education, computer programming, research), with arts, design, and media workers forming a small subset. Florida considers those belonging to this group to “fully engage in the creative process” (2002, p. 69). The Super-Creative Core is considered innovative, creating commercial products and consumer goods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_class
http://www.geekpreneur.com/the-most-destructive-creativity-myths

The Most Destructive Creativity Myths | Geekpreneur

Photography: quinn.anya You should be able to spot a creative type from a mile away. In Mad Men , the AMC show set in a 1960s advertising agency, that’s not so easy.
As a companion to my pages on early retirement , this document presents some ideas for useful and fun things to do with one's money. Simple: Donate money to Wikipedia If you're too lazy to start a new non-profit organization, donate money to Wikimedia Foundation , the folks who publish Wikipedia. In 2007, Wikipedia was the ninth most popular Web site in the world and probably accounts for a significant portion of the world's self-education. http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/

Non-profit Ideas

Social computation and creativity » Blog Archive » Bugs of colle

http://3form.org/blog/?p=37 One of my early posts was about idea killers and idea helpers . Idea killers are common phrases that kill creativity at its origin. Recently, Matt May wrote a piece called Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking , where he identified ‘Seven Sins of Solutions,’ routine patterns of thinking that prevent people from being creative. He suggests that idea stiffling is the worst sin being the most destructive. He illustrated the point by a nice experiment:

(Q&A) Your Assignment: Art

Editor's Note: This story is reprinted from Assignment Zero , an experiment in open-source, pro-am journalism produced in collaboration with Wired News. This week, we'll be republishing a selection of Assignment Zero stories on the topic of "crowdsourcing." All in all, Assignment Zero produced 80 stories, essays and interviews about crowdsourcing ; we'll reprint 12 of the best. The stories appear here exactly as Assignment Zero produced them. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/07/crowd_captain
http://swarmcreativity.blogspot.com/

Swarm Creativity Blog

We did some more coolhunting on Twitter over the last few days to check out if the negative advertising blitz against Newt Gingrich that Mitt Romney is running right now in Florida has any impact on the Twittersphere. The answer is “Yes, by all means”, which explains why even in the Romney tweets Gingrich is the most prominent word in the term view, and Gingrich is much more central among twitterers than Romney in the combined Romney-Gingrich view in Florida. As we can see, the twitterers about Gingrich tweet more, and they are also more important. The purple lines are the retweet network containing the words “gingrich” or “romney”. In Florida, few people tweet about Romney compared to Gingrich.
The functioning and usage of the Internet are examined in terms of memes and memetics. It is shown that memetic systems can be distinguished at various levels of Internet operation, and that these systems become increasingly simple as they move further from the user level. In this way, memetics provides a unified framework for examining the overall behaviour of the Internet and its users. 1. Introduction Memetics provides a powerful new way to think about things such as, for example, creativity (Gabora, 1997). http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/MemePap/Marshall.html

Internet and memetics

Social computation and creativity

http://3form.org/blog/ Knowledge market is a distributed social mechanism that helps people to identify and satisfy their demand for knowledge. It can facilitate locating existing knowledge resources similarly to what search engines do (the name social search refers to this). It can also stimulate creation of new knowledge resources to satisfy the demand (something that search engines can’t do). The goal of this post is to compare several free knowledge markets created by 3form, Naver, Yahoo, Mail.ru, and Google to identify their common elements and differences. All these sites organize collaborative problem solving activity of a large number of participants providing means and incentives to contribute participants’ intelligent abilities to the distributed problem solving process.
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2006/idea-starters-ways-to-grow-ideas/ The happier twin brother of idea killers are idea growers. Things you can say in response to ideas to help them grow. Unlike idea killers , these statements act as idea fertilizer, helping them to grow, find homes, make friends, and grow from ideas into solutions.

Berkun blog » Blog Archive » Idea helpers: ways to grow ideas

John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

It is understandable that all of us focus on short-term economic events as they play out—particularly in times of crisis and recession. At the same time, however, it is dangerous to lose sight of the deep changes that will continue to unfold long after the current economic downturn is a memory. We face a long-term performance challenge that continues to intensify.

- Popular Mechanic

December 18, 2009 2:58 AM So much innovation happens every day in labs, hangars and two-car garages across the country that picking a handful of breakthroughs is a tough challenge. Rule No. 1: To beat out the hundreds of candidates we find each year and win a Breakthrough Award, an advance has to solve problems, expand horizons or engage the imagination of millions.
1. A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink of water. The bartender thinks for a minute, pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out.

Lateral Thinking Problems - Fact

Self replicating programmable manufacturing architectures were known by von Neumann in the 1940’s (Von Neumann, 1966). Feynman knew we could arrange atoms the way we wanted in 1959 (Feynman, 1960). Drexler knew that assemblers – self replicating programmable manufacturing systems able to arrange atoms – were feasible in the late 1970’s (Drexler, 1981, 1986, 1992). Drexler’s synthesis of the ideas of Feynman and von Neumann implies that nanotechnology is feasible. Nanotechnology, the ability to inexpensively arrange atoms in most of the patterns permitted by physical law – often called the manufacturing technology of the 21 st century – is expected to revolutionize essentially all manufactured products, from computers to medical instruments to solar cells to batteries to planes and rockets.

That\u2019s impossible