Creativity and Innovation on the Web
In his post “how to be creative” Dave Pollard (How to Save the World) hits the nail on the head in describing creativity. He also goes a step further, separating out creativity from innovation. “What is creativity? It's not the same as innovation. Creativity is the ability to generate appropriate, useful ideas that don't follow logically and analytically from the information available, It's the ability to know, in a complex world where most of the relevant decision-making information is unknown or unknowable, which ideas might work, might make sense. Innovation is the effective implementation of such ideas. Both creativity and innovation are often the only ways to accomplish some of the most important value-imperatives in business: * Radically improving product or process quality, currency, design or throughput
- Improving problem-solving or decision-making
- Improving resource-use effectiveness
- Improving new product development
- Improving employee and customer satisfaction or motivation
- Predicting the future”
Whoa, that’s powerful: “... ideas that don't follow logically and analytically from the information available.” At AI, we have pieced together from various OSS projects and my own stuff, a tool that combines both creativity and innovation to help achieve what Pollard talks about.
Follow me here: Imagine an internet-managed service that offers an interactive meeting place; a tool that gives businesses the opportunity to build a deep web presence with minimal effort. It helps them inexpensively leverage their internal ideas, information and people using external ideas and information to foster a more efficient, collaborative environment, which improves the business.
As you know, RSS readers have not exactly caught on with most folks yet, leaving a gap between what is current, fuzzy, and relatively rich-information and ideas, and that which is gleaned from common keyword searches, Google, Yahoo, et al. IDEASCAPE takes advantage of new technologies: RSS, attention.xml, blogs, wikis, and intelligent tagging, that make it easier for users to find and share ideas and information important to them, no matter how it is described or whether it is inside or outside the business. In the end, it saves time and opens up new possibilities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the business besides making it more innovative.
With so much flexibility, we have the dilemma, “what is it?” The tool (IDEASCAPE) can be many things to many people depending on their goals, objectives and priorities. What works best for whom continues to unfold. I welcome any feedback or ideas that you may have. To see the tool in action, you need to register - free.
