Blog
The Creativity Gap Between Management and Employees
The creativity gap between management and employees keeps getting wider. As a creativity keynote speaker I'm hired to get employees excited about creativity and innovation. By the end of the speech, which is a combination of creativity education, fun creativity...
How Creativity and Innovation Can Save Your Life
Lately I've been hooked on the Weather Channel's new show "SOS: How to Survive", where survival expert Creek Stewart teaches innovative skills to help you survive in a dangerous situation. Each episode is about real people caught up in true stories of life or death...
How to Kill Innovation – That’s The Way It’s Always Been Done
When I ask people why we still have daylight savings time, most shrug their shoulders and say "I don't know. That's the way it's always been done". I hear this a lot as an innovation keynote speaker. Many times systems are put into place for a particular reason, and...
Inventor of Scotch Tape – Richard Gurley Drew
As a creativity keynote speaker, one of the things I talk about is serendipity, or finding something valuable that you're not looking for. Scotch brand tape was one of those serendipitous ideas that was invented to solve one problem and ended up solving many more....
Creativity and the Value of Improv
Creativity shares some of the same rules as improv. For one thing, every idea is the best idea you've ever heard. There's no judging and no denying. And that's the beauty of it. Companies and organizations that are worried about the costs of innovation, need not be...
Why Play is Important for Creativity
Most of the articles out there about play involve children and how important it is for their development. But what about adults? I guess adults don't really have to incorporate play into their lives, but how boring would that be? According to Plato "Life must be lived...
Inventor of Coston Flares
If inventors know one thing it's how to make lemons out of lemonade. History is full of stories about inventors who have succeeded despite failure and tragedy, and inventor Martha Coston dealt with both. She married a man, Benjamin Coston, a scientist who was...
Are You a Genius?
What do you think of when you hear the word genius? If you're like most people, you think that person probably has a high IQ. But IQ test scores only measure problem solving and reasoning. It doesn't measure creativity, and it doesn't account for savants. It's...
How Daydreaming Improves Creative Problem Solving
So, you're sitting there in class, reading a book or listening to a lecture, and suddenly you find yourself on a tropical island beach sipping a pina colada as the waves caress your toes. Then, just as suddenly, you snap out of it when the teacher calls on you. We all...