Next Results for articles with tag 'creativity' (14 total)
02/25/2008 05:48:29 PM 
I spent some time with Scott Belsky, the founder of Behance, to learn a little more.
1. What inspired you to make the leap from Wall Street to the creative world?
My work on Wall Street involved organizational and leadership development. I specialized in helping new, rapidly growing teams deal with the challenges that come along with growth. At night, I would try to leverage some of these skills for my friends in more creative and entrepreneurial roles. I found that, more than anyone else, creative leaders and teams struggle to push ideas forward. I became very interested in the leadership and organizational struggles of the creative world. I also believe that life is interesting because of the creative achievements around us. The music, art, design, and new businesses that start as ideas and ACTUALLY happen are the source of society's advancement.
2. Briefly describe what Behance is all about?
Behance is relentlessly focused on developing knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen. We believe that creative leaders and team are never short of ideas, but often lack the organizational skills, leadership capability, networks, and platform to push ideas forward.
Our model is very simple: Over the past two years, we have interviewed hundreds of especially productive creative teams. In each interview, we ask "how do you make ideas happen?" We zoom in on methods and tips for productivity, networking, leadership, and strategy.
Behance is NOT about idea generation or stimulating innovation. Rather, we are focused on boosting productivity and access to opportunity in the creative world.
Here are a few examples of how our products and services accomplish our mission:
Behance Network
The Behance Network was developed as a platform for efficient dissemination of creative work. If a member posts a new project that is "appreciated" by the community, then it is likely that tens of thousands of people will see the work. We've had nearly a million visitors in the past month or so, and many of the visitors come from top agencies, galleries, and other companies seeking creative talent. Members use the network as a tool for self-marketing, exchanging feedback with peers, staying accountable to goals, and building professional networks.
Action Method
There is a great, self-proclaimed shortage of productivity in the creative world. We have noticed that "office-centric" or lingo-intensive systems for productivity, including GTD, are not easily adopted among creatives. Rather, we discovered that creatives need a simple, design-centric system method for creative project management. We developed the Action Method in response to the best practices we observed. The Action Method has spawned an entire product line that is sold around the US and the Museum of Modern Art stores, including the critically acclaimed "Action Book."
Behance Magazine
As we conduct interviews, we write up articles and also generate new "tips" for creative professionals. We have gathered them together in an online magazine.
Advisory Services
Our team is starting to do a lot of consulting work for creative teams within large companies. Surprisingly, creative teams suffer from many of the same inefficiencies as a designer or artist. We think that every creative company, agency, and project needs to consider a path to what we call "productive creativity."
3. How do you see the Behance growing and developing in the future?
Our team hopes to continue developing products and services that address the needs of creative professionals. We are starting to develop some interesting web-based applications in response to suggestions we have received. We are also developing a whole pipeline of knowledge, mostly "tips," that will help boost productivity in the creative workspace. The Behance Network is also an ongoing project that we believe is only in the "first inning." Ultimately, we will feel successful if more ideas actually happen as a result of our work.
4. What are some of the biggest trends you see out there in the world of creative professionals?
There are two trends we talk about quite often:
(1) More than ever before, we are seeing "creative" as a trait actively sought by recruiters across industries. We're also seeing the more self-described "creative" folks on teams getting promoted on the basis of their creative contributions. Of course, once creative people are empowered within a company/team, there is a great need for increased leadership capability and productivity.
(2) Creative professionals are feeling more empowered to represent themselves professionally, rather than depend on being found by a headhunter or working full-time for an agency. The "freelancer" is starting to act more like a business than an individual. We see the amount of work and opportunities that Behance Network members are getting.
5. What will it take for America to compete in the battle for creative talent?
It is really interesting to consider America's "competitive advantages" over the past decades. Remember that big American companies like GE and Hewlett Packard used to compete on "efficiency." GE's development of Six Sigma and HP's advances in plant efficiency were big selling points.
However, now GE has changed their tag line to "imagination at work" and HP is all about innovation. The change in brand is evidence of the fact that efficiency is now accomplished through off-shoring and is no longer a competitive advantage.
Our team believes that innovation is the grounds for competition going forward. We also believe that innovation is the result of PRODUCTIVE creativity. As companies hire more creative professionals to fuel innovation, they will recognize the need to design teams and workflow to achieve Productive Creativity.
To stay competitive, we think American business needs to bridge the gap between creative and other departments. There must be an emphasis on the components of "Productive Creativity," and we're hoping that Behance plays a critical role in this trend.
6. Where do you find your inspiration?
Most or our team's inspirations come from our own frustrations as creative professionals. We're in a unique business where the greatest "breakthroughs" are a response to the greatest frustrations we observe in our work and when we consult for others.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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01/09/2008 10:20:17 PM (1)
(1) They talked to 9,000 consumers in 17 countries. The breakthough finding and brave prediction is the emergence of what Nokia is calling "Circular Media"
"From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call 'Circular'. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media.
We think it will work something like this; someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend, that friend takes that footage and adds an MP3 file - the soundtrack of the evening - then passes it to another friend. That friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend and so on. The content keeps circulating between friends, who may or may not be geographically close, and becomes part of the group's entertainment."
Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia
It's an interesting theory, the idea that consumers will add and to, interact and participate with media makes complete sense, but the constant addition and participation by members of a friendship group is hard to believe, as is the shelf-life of each piece of content.
This could get easily become boring in a short period of time.
Nokia's report also appears to miss the blending and blurring of user-generated and conventional media; users taking established media content and adding their own spin to that content.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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12/21/2007 07:18:40 AM
One of the non-fiction books of the year is Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, which examines the significance of rare and unexpected events and the lack of human understanding about these areas.
As human beings we are always looking to explain things and develop theories to explain the unexplainable.
The more we develop plans and process to create outcomes, its less likely that these will generate something breakthrough.
Taleb believes that tinkering and doing is the way to create and make something interesting, this isn’t about following a predictable and prescribed pathway that’s based on past events.
“Let us go one step further. It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don't know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past--but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.”
Forbes- May 23rd- 2007
While it’s undeniable that tracking and accountability are essential elements of responsibility for the agency: client relationships, there’s significant danger in believing that past results can predict future success.
In the end, it’s all about allowing and encouraging accidents to happen.
Maybe Account Planners should change their title to Accident Makers.
Agencies should look at how they can create environments and situations that allow these accidents to happen.
This could involve a radical look at how creativity is developed and the environment its developed in- our office space, etc.
We need to be more comfortable about embracing chaos.
Most significant of all, is that in a world where breaking through is getting tougher by the minute, agencies must teach their clients how to embrace “the accident”, instead of falling back on tried and tested formulas.
For many, this will involve throwing away the rules, this will be hard to do, but it’s likely that those who don’t embrace and encourage unexpected accidents, won’t achieve the success both they and their brands desire.
Here’s an interview Charlie Rose did with Nicholas Taleb in August of this year.