Mind maps are a good way of visualizing solutions to challenging problems.

One company has made swimming safer and more fun. Ask any parent about trying to teach their kids to swim and they’ll most likely tell you a story of their child being too afraid to get in the water. Whether it’s a river, the ocean, or even just the shallow end of a pool, the [...]

Maybe. CEOs, teachers, and leaders claim they want creative ideas to solve problems. But creative ideas are rejected all the time. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people have a hidden bias against creativity. We claim to like creativity, [...]

There is no question that the right brain is involved in creative thinking. But the idea that creativity is solely a function of one side of the brain is far too simplistic. The myth that it’s all about the right, well just isn’t right. As outlined in a recent article, any creative act, from solving [...]

The title says it all.

From the New York Times 9th annual year in ideas The Great Depression inspired American fashion this year, from men’s wear by John Bartlett that looked like a stylized version of Lewis Hine’s New York to frocks by Ralph Lauren that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Dorothea Lange photograph. Meanwhile, off the runways, [...]

When you’re done with this cardboard box you can tear it up and plant it. Seeds embedded in the recycled card will grow up to 100 trees. See more here.

You know Big Data is a Big Deal when NPR runs a story, or in this case a mini-series, on it. Big Data refers to the huge amount of data collected through numerous sources that can be captured, processed and analyzed to guide science and marketing, and everything in between, and the rate of growth [...]

You will have seen the announcement earlier this year that pop sensation Lady Gaga has become the creative director for instant camera company Polaroid. The cynical amongst us might view this as a publicity stunt that won’t translate into anything more than a few column inches. After all, now that all pictures are pretty much [...]

Watch the film on the manufacturers website of it morphing. It’s a real product from the Netherlands. http://www.bloomframe.nl/

Walmart is using Big Data gleaned from social media to target consumers with highly relevant suggestions for products. Last year it bought a startup focused on social media, Kosmix, and formed WalmartLabs. It uses Kosmix’s vast knowledge base, called ‘Social Genome’  to capture information and relationships about entities such as people, events, topics, products, locations [...]

Punk band Anti-Flag and useless.org released a limited edition tee shirt for Earth Day. The shirts are unwanted shirts that were gathering dust in Anti-Flag’s warehouse, that have now been repurposed with a new message. All proceeds fund a water and sanitation project in Sierra Leone. See more details here.

David Owens of Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Graduate School of Management outlines what his research has shown him are the the most common hurdles for innovation that a company might encounter: – Failures of innovation are failures of ideas, and to meet this challenge companies need to train people to use the tools and processes that [...]

Probably the best speech on creativity I’ve seen