as promised in my previous novella, some mindbytes from the creative company conference on april 1st 2008 in Amsterdam:

John Howkins: Creativity needs freedom. We dream @ 8-12 hertz, we analyse @ 16-25 Hertz. The challenge is to manage the switch. People in creative sectors are 2-3 times more educated than in other sectors: creativity requires thinking for yourself and confidence. The right setting for innovation isn’t a mechanism but an ecology, a habitat. Western creativity is individual, elitist, about freedom and expression, while eastern creativity is collective, consensual, about harmony and dialogue.

Ivy Ross: getting creativity inside your organisation is about creating an adaptive dynamic living system as opposed to creating a mechanism. Creativity is not so much about the process as it is about setting the right conditions. Creativity requires playfulness, trust, connectivity, immersion, skill, risk, patience, courage, love, surrender. Innovation = play with purpose. Play is not what we do but how we do it. If you want output of a team, you need to provide some input first. Ivy calls herself a visionary who knows how to execute. She wears really pink clothes.

Robert Brozin: you’ve got to understand your past to understand your future. Having his company on the stock market was the worst period of his career. Stock=short term. Great brands are created from the inside.

Arkadi Kuhlman: people like things that don’t make sense.

Richard Reed: 6 rules to entrepreneurship: keep the main thing the main thing; have a purpose (beyond the cash); do the right thing; it’s about people; take care of the details; open up & listen up.

Bill Moggridge: It’s really easy to do a bad job if you forget the end-user. Design can harness tacit knowledge plus logical thinking. From general design awareness (how to choose) to specialist design skills (how to do it) to interdisciplinary design thinking (what to do) to design research (what to know). Prototypes are like stories about people.

Peter Diamandis: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. The scarcest resource on the planet is the human mind’s commitment to a goal (“Maybe it’s impossible for you, but i’m going to go ahead and do it”). A 10 mln dollar prize generated a 100 mln worth of innovation: a new businessmodel for innovation.

Paul Hughes: three levels of design: form&function; systems&processes; strategy. You can analyse the past, but what has happened probably won’t continue to happen. The future you have to design. Design thinking is about a loop envisioning the future, prototyping it, testing it and adapting it. Iteration.

Walter Amerika : advertising is in trouble. Offline advertising is down to the level it was in 1959 (?) Design companies are shouting for innovation capabilities.

Marcel Wanders: creatives used to be like your younger brother: funny but a little stupid.