A recent Sandpit on the topic of energy efficiency gave us reason to pause and consider the carbon output of our own work. Given that we travel to hotels or meeting venues to work with our clients, and that very often the people we work with are collected from far-flung locations to come together for innovation workshops and sessions, it dawned on us we might be churning out a fair amount of CO2. Keep reading »

The entire Knowinnovation team is together in Italy this week to celebrate the anniversary of Leonardo DaVinci’s birthday, on April 15th, which also happens to be the beginning of World Creativity and Innovation Week.

All our thinking and wondering about creativity and innovation is aided by the fact that we are gathered with other peers and colleagues and friends at the European Creativity Conference, otherwise known as CREA. Since 2003, the CREA conference has been a draw for people interested in exploring creativity and how to be more deliberate about it. CREA is a sister-conference to the Creative Problem Solving Institute, CPSI, the first ever creativity conference – it’s been an annual event for more than 55 years – sponsored by the Creative Education Foundation, the CEF. Keep reading »

Imagine if all you had was one thing to work with, and one thing to produce. What would you do with such a tabula rasa? What could you create? How would that free you up? Keep reading »

A century ago British psychologist Edward Titchener described the “warm glow of familiarity,” the idea that people develop a preference for things that are familiar to them. There’s been a fair amount of research on the Exposure Effect, how repetition increases the likelihood of affinity.

But then there’s always the old adage: familiarity breeds contempt.

Which is it? Does familiarity make you like something, or not? Keep reading »

At lunch, the participants seemed lighter, relieved. Their 10-minute final pitches for funding behind them, the weight of the week’s work had been shed. There was nothing to do but wait for the assessment team to finish their deliberations and in the meantime get a bite to eat and socialise with the others in the group, new colleagues who just four days ago were perfect strangers. This is what Fridays are like at a Sandpit.

Last week, 27 people assembled at a conference hotel in Bath Spa, UK, to try their luck at getting funding to do research on user-centered design for energy efficiency in buildings. Their backgrounds were varied; a deliberate attempt was made to invite participants from a broad spectrum of academic and business backgrounds. Participants applied to attend, which means they were prepared to clear a five full days from their schedules and throw their lots in with a group of people they didn’t know, but with whom they’d have to partner in order to get funded. The amount of money on the table: up to 2 million sterling. Keep reading »

Hacker is a word that gets hijacked too often, casually tossed out as an adjective – not always but usually pejorative – to describe someone capable of cracking the code of a computer system and having their way with it. Editor of the Jargon File, Eric Steve Raymond, would substitute the label “cracker” for that subset of the code-literate community. “Hackers build things,” he says, “crackers break them.” Keep reading »

Last summer, I had occasion to spend a day at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Initially I was somewhat reluctant about the excursion, but once I got there, all I wanted to do was play. The sheer volume of dolls and toys that are housed in this museum is stunning (every model of Barbie and GI Joe ever made, for instance) and the interactive activities – things you can get in, try, touch, and fiddle with – throughout every exhibit of the museum, are as intriguing for adults as for children (ahem). Keep reading »

Succeeding in the current business climate may have little to do with what you know, and much more to do with your ability to find out what you don’t know. In other words, asking questions may be one of the best tools for innovation.

The Harvard Business Review posed the question, “how do innovators think?” to two business school professors, Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregerson of INSEAD, who together conducted a 6-year survey of over 3000 creative executives to try to explain how the “innovator’s DNA” works. Keep reading »

Kia, a car company, has taken an interesting approach to building up traffic to its new website shape your soul. Working with a fascinating agency called Curb, they arranged to have the website address spray cleaned into dirty streets. In essence, they turned grime into a new medium.

Being photographed by the paparazzi was once an (often dubious) honour bestowed only on the rich and famous, but today a new service is bringing the possibility to every consumer.

So starts a story over at Unusual Business Ideas That Work (one of our favourite sites). You can read the whole story by clicking on the link above. However, for those of you too busy to click, we can summarise it as follows:

These guys will follow you around – for a fee – and snap candid pictures of you.

On the face of it, this is a very unlikely business indeed. But, in fact, this is just tapping into the same desire that leads people to buy fake goods. We all know the Fendi handbag, for 10 Euros, won’t last as long, or be as good as the real thing, but it doesn’t matter.

So, what other “problems” do celebrities suffer from, that might actually provide good business opportunities?