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Good luck with that.

As several recent studies highlight, the way most of us spend our mornings is exactly counter to the conditions that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us promote flexible, open-minded thinking. Take that hurried wake-up, for example. In a study published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning last year, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks reported that imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made. Sleepy people’s “more diffuse attentional focus,” they write, leads them to “widen their search though their knowledge network. This widening leads to an increase in creative problem solving.” By not giving yourself time to tune into your meandering mind, you’re missing out on the surprising solutions it may offer. (If you happen to be one of those perky morning people, your most inventive time comes when you’re winding down in the early evening.)

Your commute filled with honking cars or sharp-elbowed fellow passengers doesn’t help, either. The stress hormone cortisol can harm myelin, the fatty substance that coats our brain cells. Damage to these myelin sheaths slows down the speed with which signals are transmitted between neurons, making lightning-quick “Eureka!” moments less likely. And while we all should read up on what’s going on in the world, it may be better to put that news website or newspaper aside until after the day’s work is done. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science found that subjects who watched brief video clips that made them feel sad were less able to solve problems creatively than people who watched an upbeat video. A positive mood, wrote researcher Ruby Nadler and her coauthors, increases “cognitive flexibility,” while a negative mood narrows our mental horizons. The segment that made participants feel worst of all? A news report about an earthquake.

The only thing most of us do right in the morning, in fact, is drink coffee. Caffeine not only makes us more alert, as we all know — it also increases the brain’s level of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that influences feelings of motivation and reward when we hit on a great idea. (Nicotine does this, too, but I can’t in good conscience recommend an a.m. cigarette.)

So what would our mornings look like if we re-engineered them in the interest of maximizing our creative problem-solving capacities? We’d set the alarm a few minutes early and lie awake in bed, following our thoughts where they lead (with a pen and paper nearby to jot down any evanescent inspirations.) We’d stand a little longer under the warm water of the shower, dismissing task-oriented thoughts (“What will I say at that 9 a.m. meeting?”) in favor of a few more minutes of mental dilation. We’d take some deep breaths during our commute, instead of succumbing to road rage. And once in the office — after we get that cup of coffee — we’d direct our computer browser not to the news of the day but to the funniest videos the web has to offer.

For decades, psychologists have manipulated the emotions of subjects in the lab by showing them short film clips. But now there’s YouTube — and, in fact, the clip that made the participants in Ruby Nadler’s study happiest of all was a YouTube video of a laughing baby. Laughing babies and a double latte: now that’s a way to start the day.

Paul, the author of Origins, is at work on a book about the science of learning. The views expressed are solely her own.

By Erik W. Robelen Education Week

At a time when U.S. political and business leaders are raising concerns about the need to better nurture creativity and innovative thinking among young people, several states are exploring the development of an index that would gauge the extent to which schools provide opportunities to foster those qualities.

In Massachusetts, a new state commission began meeting last fall to draft recommendations for such an index for all public schools, in response to a legislative requirement. Meanwhile, the California Senate last month approved a bill calling for the development of a voluntary Creative and Innovative Education Index.

And Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin recently announced plans for a public-private partnership to produce an innovation index for schools, which she described as a “public measurement of the opportunities for our students to engage in innovative work.”

Gov. Fallin couched the plan squarely in an economic context to advance the state’s competitiveness and prepare young people for the workforce. The index, the Republican said, would prove a “very valuable tool to help Oklahoma be a national leader in innovation, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship.”

Advocates say the idea is to promote a better balance in the curriculum, as well as campus offerings before and after school, especially in the era of high-stakes testing in reading and math.

“We’re tapping into a very clear need, as expressed particularly by employers, to reincorporate into the curriculum and school experience many opportunities for young people to develop creativity-oriented skills,” said Massachusetts Sen. Stan Rosenberg, a Democrat and the lead sponsor of his chamber’s 2010 bill calling for the index.

The Massachusetts legislation calls for an index that would “rate every public school on teaching, encouraging, and fostering creativity in students” and be based “in part on the creative opportunities in each school.”

It cites as examples arts education, debate clubs, science fairs, filmmaking, and independent research.

Many advocates acknowledge the challenges of creating an index that doesn’t turn into a mere checklist or become viewed as punitive.

Alicia A. Priest, the vice president of the Oklahoma Education Association, expressed mixed feelings about the concept.

“We are very interested in the idea, but the devil is in the details,” she said. She noted concerns about using the approach to publicly measure schools, and even prefers to call the mechanism a “framework” instead of an index.

“If it’s going to be something used as punitive, or even the appearance of, ‘You’re not good enough,’ then that’s not OK,” Ms. Priest said.

Risky Business?

The emerging state efforts to promote creativity and innovation among their students pick up on a theme that’s been gaining steam for some time in American political, business, and education circles.

“Building capacity to create and innovate in our students is central to guaranteeing the nation’s competitiveness,” declared the President’s Council of Advisers on the Arts and Humanities in a report last year.

In addition, fostering creativity has become a high priority among some of the United States’ top economic competitors. In a recent Education Week Commentary, Byong-man Ahn, a former South Korean minister of education, said that “creating the type of education in which creativity is emphasized over rote learning” is a top education goal for his government. (“Education in the Republic of Korea,” Jan. 12, 2012.)

Researchers have recently examined the subject of teaching creativity, but experts are just beginning to determine what makes some students more creative than their peers and how the classroom environment can nurture, or smother, that capacity.

In fact, some emerging research seems to point to two critical aspects of creativity that can be hard to teach: the willingness to take risks and learn from failure, and the ability to transfer ways of solving problems between seemingly unrelated situations. (“Science Looks at How to Inspire Creativity,” Dec. 14, 2011.)

Robert J. Sternberg, the provost and a professor of psychology and education at Oklahoma State University, who is an expert in intelligence-testing and has studied creativity extensively, said he’s encouraged by Oklahoma’s interest in developing an innovation index. He said it’s important for schools to teach creative thinking, and developing some form of accountability around that is a good idea.

But, in an email, he cautioned that there are risks.

For example, “We don’t want an index that trivializes creativity, such as by counting numbers of activities that, on their surface, sound creative rather than exploring what is actually done in the activities to encourage creativity,” he wrote. Also, “We don’t want to encourage quantity over quality of activities.”

The apparent originator and a leading proponent of the index idea is Daniel J. Hunter, a playwright and founding partner of a Boston-based public relations firm who previously served as the director of Iowa’s cultural-affairs department.

“This is not an effort to overthrow standardized testing,” but rather “to provide schools with incentives to spend more time and resources” fostering student creativity, said Mr. Hunter, who also previously led a Massachusetts advocacy group for arts and culture that has disbanded.

“If the only public measurement of your school is a standardized test, then schools have every incentive to teach to the test,” he said. “The index is a tool to get to what is happening in the classroom.”

The Massachusetts commission has met twice in recent months to explore what’s being called there the Creative Challenge Index.

“Our charge is to figure out what the index should be and how it would be implemented,” said Jonathan C. Rappaport, a commission member and the executive director of Arts/Learning, a nonprofit group based in Natick, Mass. “We’re only in the beginning stages.”

But he and others stressed that the idea is far different from the state’s testing system: The focus of the proposed index is “inputs,” not “outputs.”

“This is really to measure inputs, to show what opportunities kids have in their school day,” Mr. Rappaport said.

And he said it’s not simply about identifying classes or activities, but also the extent to which they actually encourage creativity.

“Just taking a music class doesn’t mean you’re going to be creative,” he said.

Mr. Rappaport said the state may identify a handful of school districts that want to experiment with the idea on a pilot basis.

“We have to implement it in stages,” he said.

He and other commission members say they are keenly aware of the dangers of crafting an oversimplified index that fails to adequately reflect opportunities for creativity, or that fosters the wrong incentives.

Susan Y. Wheltle, the director of literacy and humanities for the Massachusetts education department, said that at the most recent meeting, commission members “had a very thoughtful discussion of how [the index] might be helpful in some ways and damaging in others.”

She said: “Certainly, publishing ratings is one way that calls attention to a problem, but people also knew from their experience in schools how damaging it could be to say to the community, ‘Look, this is somebody who rates very low on the scale.’ ”

Action to carry out the Massachusetts legislation has been slow, with the deadline for developing recommendations having been extended twice. But state officials say that with the commission members now all named—a joint process involving the governor and the state Senate and House—work is getting under way.

Ms. Wheltle and others say it would take further action by lawmakers, however, to require that an index be implemented.

Paul Toner, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said he welcomes the idea of an index as advancing a “multiple measures” approach to evaluating schools.

“We see it as a way to get away from focusing on one or two test scores,” he said, to “broaden the focus of what schools should be paying attention to: the whole child.”

‘Inspect What We Expect’

In Oklahoma, members have yet to be named to the panel that is to develop the index.

Susan E. McCalmont, the president of Creative Oklahoma, a nonprofit group helping to spearhead the undertaking, said a lot of questions remain.

“The work of the task force will be looking at how to set up parameters to measure,” she said, and how to report that information to the public.

She noted that Oklahoma recently rolled out a system of letter grades for schools based mainly on test scores, and suggested that the results of the innovation index might be included along with those grades in school report cards, but in a different fashion.

“We do not want to do a letter grade, and we haven’t decided if we’re going to do a number, but it will be something easily understood, so this school is further ahead in [fostering] creativity and innovation than another,” Ms. McCalmont said. “But it’s not a tool intended to be punitive.”

“To date,” she said, “there’s been measurement of everything else, but this was not on the table.”

There already appears to be some division, however, on key aspects of the idea, including whether the index would be mandatory for public schools. Ms. McCalmont said she envisions that approach.

Gov. Fallin did not explicitly address the issue in her speech announcing the plan, but seemed to suggest it would be far-reaching.

“We’re going to have an index, we’re going to inspect what we expect in our schools,” she said. “Schools will be recognized for their innovation indexes.”

Phyllis Hudecki, Oklahoma’s secretary of education and a member of the governor’s cabinet, suggested that requiring participation might be a mistake.

“I don’t foresee a mandate,” she said, arguing that educators already feel burdened with the “continuous piling-on of requirements, and now we want you also to include creativity and innovation? They look at you like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”

Also, while the governor described the effort as designed to “measure” what schools are doing to promote creativity, Ms. Hudecki downplayed that notion.

” ‘Measuring’ may be too strong a word,” she said, emphasizing that much remains to be decided.

“We don’t have any meat on the bones yet,” she said.

In California, the bill passed in January to develop a creativity index is similar to the Massachusetts measure, but is explicitly identified as a voluntary index. Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed a version without that stipulation, included in a broader bill, last year.

Joe Landon, the executive director of the California Alliance for Arts Education, a strong backer of the bill, said he prefers that the index be mandatory, but said that wouldn’t be politically feasible.

“When it’s a mandate, then everybody has to respond, but in these economic times, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We need to start somewhere, and this is a good place to start.”

Vol. 31, Issue 19

Steve Denning, Contributor Forbes

History is a record of exploded ideas.

- Admiral Fisher

In a stunning article in Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz asks the critical question: is the US economy going through a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy? Is the US economy is undergoing a phase change—a shift from one fundamental economic state to another?

The economic recovery that isn’t

Stiglitz shows that despite recent improvements there has been no “economic recovery” in the sense of any previous “economic recovery”:

• Almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession, there are still 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago.
• Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term.
• Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.
• A short-term stimulus, moderate in size, was put in place to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.
• Some of the money that bailed out the banks went to Wall Street bonuses. Little of it went to lending in support of the real economy.
• A tripling of the Fed’s balance sheet provided large quantities of very cheap money to big business and banks.
• The banks have recovered but the economy hasn’t—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis. In per capita terms, it is negative. The job situation is improving but remains bleak.
• For the first time since the Great Depression of the 1930, four years after the onset of recession, unemployment has exceeded 8 percent  and economic output is barely greater.

Diabetes, not the flu

Why no recovery? The idea of the bailouts and the stimulus was that these measures would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis.

The striking part of Stiglitz’s argument is to say that this is indeed what has happened. The economy has gotten back to its former state. The problem, says Stiglitz, is that the former state of the economy was much worse than anyone realized. Getting back to where we were means getting back to a state of sickness, not to health.

Repairing the banking system didn’t fix the economy, because the economy was already in deep trouble, long before the financial meltdown of 2008. The boom years leading up to the meltdown were a mirage fueled by unsustainable debt. Although US firms were still leading the information-technology revolution, incomes for most working Americans hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income. This level of indebtedness was enabled by the housing bubble, which the Fed helped the banks engineer. The arrangements were based on asset valuations “determined in part by mass delusion”.

Stiglitz might have drawn on the Deloitte’s Shift Index to support his case with the steady decline in the rate of return on assets and invested income of US firms.

The economy in the years before the current crisis existed in a bubble. The unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acted as life support. Without these supports, unemployment would have been high.

It was “absurd to think,” says Stiglitz, “that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to ‘where it was’ did nothing to address the underlying problems.”

The diagnosis of the situation was wrong, argues Stiglitz. It’s as if the economic doctors saw the economy as having a temporary disease, like a bout of the flu, when in fact it was suffering from a chronic disease like diabetes that will take years to deal with.

The analogy to the Great Depression

Stiglitz draws a striking parallel to the Great Depression, which is often attributed to a meltdown of the banking system. The conventional wisdom is that the Fed caused the Depression by tightening the money supply. If only the Fed back then had increased the money supply, it is said, a full-blown Depression might have been averted. This enduring belief among economists explains why the Fed is now massively expanding the money supply, i.e. “to avoid the mistake of the Great Depression.”

In reality, according to Stiglitz, the banking crisis of 1933 didn’t cause the Great Depression. The financial meltdown reflected a phase change in the economy from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy. The financial meltdown of 1933 was the consequence not the cause of the Great Depression. The joblessness of the times was a sign of the economic phase change already well under way.

Thus in 1900, it took a large portion of the U.S. population to produce enough food for the country as a whole. With better farming practices, fewer people were needed. At the beginning of the 1930s, more than a fifth of all Americans still worked on farms. A much smaller percentage was actually needed. Today, 2 percent of Americans produce more food than we can consume. The Great Depression, says Stiglitz, was about finding jobs for all those who were no longer needed on farms.

Thus the breakdown of the banking system in the Great Depression didn’t culminate until 1933, after the Depression began and after unemployment had started to soar. By 1931 unemployment was already around 16 percent, and it reached 23 percent in 1932. The underlying cause was a structural change in the real economy.

With accelerating productivity in the 1920s, farm output increased faster than demand. Prices and incomes fell sharply. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. A financial crisis ensued because the farmers couldn’t pay back what they owed and the banks that had lent them money became insolvent.

The economy stumbled along for almost a decade after the meltdown in 1933. It only recovered by accident, as a result of World War II.  Government spending unintentionally completed the necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing.

The crisis in the real economy

Stiglitz sees today’s problems of the banking sector, though bad enough, as a red herring in our search for real solutions. The real solutions are “rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced.” A crisis of the real economy is the cause of the current Great Stagnation, just as it was the root cause of the Great Depression.

Stiglitz sees a strong parallel between the origin of the Great Depression and the origin of our current Great Stagnation. In the Great Depression, the economy shifted from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are once again moving from one kind of economy to another.

Stiglitz notes the shift of jobs out of manufacturing. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today, as a result of greater productivity anda disastrous outsourcing of manufacturing overseas. The millions of jobless former factory workers of today are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.

The transition to the Creative Economy

If the phase change in the Great Depression was a transition from agriculture to manufacturing, what is the transition to today? Stiglitz sees it as atransition from manufacturing to a service economy.

A service economy is certainly one looming possibility for the US economy, but a service economy per se is unlikely to be an American success story. If all American workers do is mow lawns, cut hair, export raw materials, and market and sell goods manufactured in other countries, the wealth of the nation is unlikely to be great. The US will in effect have become a Third World economy. It will be unable to support even the current standard of living, let alone an improving quality of life. In effect, a service economy with sharply lower incomes and standard of living for most people will be politically unacceptable.

Instead the needed transition is from a factory economy to the Creative Economy. The Creative Economy is one in which both manufacturing andservices play a role. It is an economy in which the driving force is innovation. It is an economy in which organizations are nimble and agile and continually offering new value to customers and delivering it sooner. The Creative Economy is an economy in which firms focus not on short-term financial returns but rather on creating long-term customer value based on trust. It is described in Chapter 3 of Richard Florida’s classic book, The Rise of the Creative Class (2003).

What must the private sector do?

Most large firms of today are ill-equipped to compete in the emerging Creative Economy, in which globalization and the shift in power in the marketplace from seller to buyer have put the customer in charge.   Most big firms still have a factory mindset oriented to economies of scale. They are focused principally on maximizing short-term shareholder value. They are not organized for continuous innovation. This way of managing is unable to mobilize the full creative talents of their employees. As noted above, the rate of return on assets and invested capital has been in steady decline for decades. Many firms are currently over-capitalized and yet unable to find productive uses for the money in a stagnant economy. Lending more money to these firms will do little to help revive the struggling economy. So long as these firms adhere to the goal of maximizing shareholder returns—which even Jack Welch says is “the dumbest idea in the world”—they will have great difficulty in operating effectively in The Creative Economy.

“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman School ofManagement at the University of Toronto, in wonderful his book, Fixing the Game (2011). “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”

The Fortune 500 must master the management principles needed for continuous innovation that delights customers. The command-and-control management of hierarchical bureaucracy is inherently unable to delight anyone–it was never intended to. To delight customers, a radically different kind of management needs to be in place, with a different role for the managers, a different way of coordinating work, a different set of values and a different way of communicating. This is not rocket science. It’s called radical management.

Firms like Apple [AAPL], Amazon [AMZN] or Salesforce [CRM] are showing the way. Those firms that opt not to change won’t survive. The choice is clear: delight or die.

The Creative Economy will also be partly built on manufacturing. This is not about a shift out of manufacturing into services. In fact, although jobs were lost, manufacturing never died. Even adjusted for inflation, manufacturing output is near an all-time high. In real terms, we’re making more than twice as much today as we were in the early 1970s.

True, some manufacturing subsectors were lost due to short-term profit taking. In the foreign outsourcing of manufacturing, managers chased economies of scale, often overlooking the additional costs of transport, inventory management, quality control, sales, marketing and distribution of large production runs, as well the risks involved in such extended supply chains. They paid scant attention to the long-run costs of losing knowledge and the opportunity to learn.

Now the economics of large-scale production runs carried out overseas are being undermined by the possibility of making, selling and delivering millions of manufactured items one unit at a time, right next to the customer. Digital manufacturing is beginning to do to manufacturing what the Internet has done to information-based goods and services. Just as video went from a handful of broadcast networks to millions of producers on YouTube within a decade, a massive transition from centralized production to a “maker culture” of dispersed manufacturing innovation is under way today.

What must government do?

Stiglitz advocates “a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment.” He suggests large investments in infrastructure, technology, and education for decades, as well as support for “small and medium-size companies, especially new ones, which are disproportionately the source of job creation in any economy, and they have been especially hard-hit. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending.”

Stiglitz asks: “Can we actually bring ourselves to do this, in the absence of mobilization for global war?” and replies: “Maybe not.” Clearly, when politics is dominated by issues such as whether the President is born in Kenya (he wasn’t), whether the country should repay its debts (it must), whether people should have affordable health care (they should), or whether the country should maintain its infrastructure (it has no choice), it is reasonable to wonder whether the country can muster the intelligence and the will needed for such a great effort.

Nevertheless, change will happen: the economic situation will continue to deteriorate until the pain becomes so great that action will have be to be taken. The question is whether we fight the phase change or facilitate it.

A huge opportunity awaits us

We have, Stiglitz suggests, misunderstood our situation. We are not as well off as we thought we were. The pain that we feel is the inevitable pain of a great economic phase change. Americans in general are coming to understand what has happened. What is needed now is a focus on the opportunities offered by the future. We need a clear understanding of the nature of the journey that we are negotiating and intelligent action to get through the transition as quickly and painlessly as possible. The Creative Economy is a huge opportunity that awaits us.

Science Museum Oklahoma will debut its newest exhibit Feb. 11. “Out of the Box” is a collaboration among several Oklahoma companies, including the Oklahoma City Thunder, Rocktown Climbing Gym, Titus Construction and Kimray

BY CARRIE COPPERNOLL ccoppernoll@opubco.com – NewsOK

Installation began Monday on a new exhibit at Science Museum Oklahoma that challenged more than a dozen companies to display their creativity.

“Out of the Box” opens with a free reception from 7 to 10 p.m. Feb. 11 at the museum, 2100 NE 52.The 13 participating companies came up with their own creative project representing their company, said Suzette Ellison, vice president of programs and interpretation for the museum.

The catch: They had to use each of 15 random items delivered in a box.

Items included copper tubing, a fan blade, glue sticks and a bike tire.

“It’s like when you go out and clean out your garage,” Ellison said. “You find things that are like, ‘Oh yeah! We saved this thing because I wanted to do something with it.’”

Projects range from a light kaleidoscope to kinetic art.

“We want to show that anybody and everybody can be creative problem-solvers,” Ellison said. “Science is about creativity and problem-solving.”

Participating companies are Anchor Paint of OKC, Buchanan Bicycles, Elemental Coffee Roasters, Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics, Kimray, Oklahoma City Thunder, Palmer Studios Inc., Red Earth Systems, Rocktown Climbing Gym, SAIC, Studio Architecture, Hom by WarHall and @Link Services.

Bob Palmer, of Palmer Studios, worked on the Anchor Paint project, which has robots built out of paint cans painting logos on a wall.

“It’s fun,” Palmer said. “It’s a good way to advertise your business and work collaboratively.”

The Studio Architecture display is a cube on wheels, said Andrew Stewart, an intern architect. Visitors can crawl inside and pedal around. Inside is a bench, drafting table and architecture sketches.

“We are trying to communicate what Studio Architecture is about and what architecture is about in a small space,” Stewart said. “So we came up with what it’s like inside the mind of an architect. We wanted something fun and engaging for the museumgoers.”

CONTRIBUTING: Susan Wright, for The Oklahoman

Posted By: Nicole Spiegel-Gotsch, Graphic Design

In my January 3rd article, Fueling the Creative Economy I wrote about the appointment of Joe Bookchin to the position of director of the Office of the Creative Economy in Vermont, as well as creative economy initiatives in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and their importance to our industry’s continued health and development.

Subsequently, I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by Jean Maginnis, Founder & Executive Director,Maine Center for Creativity and Christine Harris, CEO Christine Harris Connections and Executive AdvisorCreative Alliance Milwaukee who informed me of their respective creative alliances as well as others, and the newly formed National Creativity Network, an organization that believes in fostering creativity as being key to innovation and economic success in America right now.

They, along with Margaret Collins, Executive Director, Center for Creative Economy Piedmont Triad, North Carolina Susan McCalmont, President, Creative Oklahoma, Elizabeth Murphy, Consulting Director, Creative New Jersey, Dave Baldwin, President, Aquarian Technology Systems, Ltd, Creative Ohio and George Tzougros, National Creativity Network Chairperson and Executive Director, Wisconsin Arts Board were gracious enough to grant me an interview where they responded to four questions about their ongoing initiatives:

1. What are your top/high priority initiatives for stimulating creative economy in your region?

2. What would you say are the biggest challenges regionally or otherwise for creative industries right now? Across the board the answer to this question was current economic conditions and education.

3. How can graphic designers be more involved in supporting industry growth and health?

4. There seems to be a commoditization and devaluing trend in creative services. Part of this can probably be attributed to economic pressures. What advice would you give graphic designers to counter this?

Jean Maginnis, Maine Center for Creativity: Definitely Art All Around®, a major public art project that pairedSprague Energy corporation with the arts community “to transform 16 oil storage tanks on Portland harbor into an integrated ‘canvas’ of color and design…” with the added dimension of being visible from a Google Earth perspective. Part of the project was a blind International Design Competition, with a panel of nine jurors from Maine and countries including Spain, Germany and Canada, which received 560 proposals from 80 countries. Five semi-finalists received a $10,000 cash prize and the finalist; Jaime Gili received an additional $20,000. Maginnis described experiencing an “aha moment” when biking with her husband in Bug Light park in South Portland thinking about the concept of “think tanks” and wondering how to “capture the public imagination with a large arts & industry collaboration” and suddenly seeing the oil tanks as potential canvasses.

So far they have raised $950,000 towards their 1.3 million dollar goal and are in the final phase of painting eight oil tanks and tops. There is an additional $350,000 to raise in order to paint the additional tanks. Maginnis also spoke about the importance of building infrastructure programs and their well-attended “Creative Toolbox” series of presentations in partnership with the University of Southern Maine designed to provide creatives with skills, resources and information to succeed economically and Pecha Kucha nights where designers and creative people can meet, network and share their work.

Margaret Collins, Center for Creative Economy, North Carolina: For Collins, what started as a Piedmont Triad workforce development grant, after four years has evolved into the Center for Creative Economy. Based in North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad encompassing Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point, in the middle of the state, the Center for Creative Economy’s focus is on creating a “catalyst for innovation” by getting business and creatives working together, connecting creatives to business networks and vice versa. Collins’ defines her role as “being an advocate for creatives here [North Carolina].”

To that end, some of the Center’s high priority projects are their Innovation Summits, designed to bring creative and business people together, Triad Design Leadershop, customized creative workshops exploring design thinking, “Creatini” themed networking events that aggregate creative community, feature guest speakers and create a space for idea sharing and the Idea Index “a fully interactive online creative directory featuring artists, designers, and other creative professionals in the Piedmont Triad who want to showcase their portfolios, videos, and creative work.” One of the more unique features of the Idea Index differentiating it from other creative directories is the ability to submit and respond to RFPs online as well as Panels, the community component encouraging dialogue and exchange between business and creative users. The Idea Index actualizes Collins’ intention to provide “robust infrastructure” and “bridge communities by putting them in dialogue so that people can understand the value creatives can bring.”

Elizabeth Murphy, Creative New Jersey: Murphy, representing the youngest organization of the group, related how last June the founding members of Creative New Jersey held a statewide open-space Call To Collaboration where 150 leaders from a wide range of sectors assembled to answer the central question: “How can creativity and innovation revitalize New Jersey?” The success of this event has set in motion the development of a statewide series of Community Creativity Convenings.

These self-directed conferences include a broad multi-generational and sector demographic of “arts leaders, educators, business leaders, mayors, philanthropists, sustainability folks, students, and tech” and are designed to stimulate a “ground up” movement to “…foster creativity, innovation and sustainability and to exploit how the creative industries can have a transformative effect on the economy and people’s lives.” As well as encourage connections between nonprofits, governments, businesses and philanthropic organizations. “When we meet at the intersection of seemingly disparate disciplines, we have the opportunity for our own ideas to clash and combine with others, thereby encouraging an explosion of potentially groundbreaking, new ideas.”

Christine Harris, Creative Alliance Milwaukee: Harris articulated Creative Milwaukee’s high priority asconnecting on a government level to address recognition that this [creative economy] is a cluster and to promote self-identification [within the creative community] as a cluster. As well as, working closely with state economic development corporation to get recognition as a cluster worthy of investment. George Tzougros further underscored Harris’ point by stating that “since government had been built for the industrial age [the value of creative economy] tended to appear less substantial. David Baldwin commented at this point as well, referencing the World Future Society, the Center for Communities of the Future and describing the overall shift away from the industrial economy toward a “transformation of all systems and the emergence of a new Creative Molecular Economy.”

Susan McCalmont, Creative Oklahoma: Echoing Baldwin’s sentiments, McCalmont cited education, commerce and culture and how to build a pipeline to creative economy in Oklahoma as being among Creative Oklahoma’s top priorities. Some of the guiding questions for her were “What are barriers to economic growth?, What are the barriers to quality of life?, What are our strengths in Oklahoma?” She described her work with marketers, graphic designers and public television to establish Oklahoma as a creative center in the minds of local businesses, who traditionally may have looked outside the state for their creative resources through major events such as the Oklahoma Creativity Forum.

She also talked about initiatives to retain talent in film and music, areas of particular strength in Oklahoma by creating jobs around those industries. She described a creativity ambassador initiative, a group of prominent creative professionals who through “public service announcements, performances, speaking engagements, and sharing of their knowledge in their respective fields” help change perceptions of Oklahoma both within and outside the state. On the workforce development side McCalmont talked about modular learning units offered to businesses and job fairs connecting university students with businesses as well as grants and awards programs.

David Baldwin, Creative Ohio: Creative Ohio is just forming as a result of Baldwin’s attendance at theCreativity World Forum in Oklahoma City in 2010. Baldwin describes Creative Ohio as self-organizing and not honing in on any one aspect of the arts or focusing solely on the economic benefit, but the transformational benefit of building a [creative] network and celebrating [creative] activity.

Whereas responses regarding individual organizational goals and initiatives varied, responses to the other three questions of challenges for the creative industries, how designers can be more involved in supporting industry growth and health, and how designers can counter the trend toward the commoditization of their services were relatively similar.

Poor economic conditions causing companies to tighten their belts on creative spending, sluggish investment growth and lack of organizational structure were among the main challenges to creative industries cited, along with a lack of understanding of design and innovation having organizational value as opposed to being merely technical products, and the importance of client education regarding this added value.

Response to the question “How can graphic designers be more involved in supporting industry growth and health?” was practically unilateral—get involved in the creative community, advocate for creative services,speak or write on creativity and an often overlooked but equally important part of the equation—communicatetraining and education needs back to academic institutions.

Lastly, in response to the question of how to counter the commoditization of the creative industry the answer was overwhelmingly “build your brand,” “build relationships,” and be able to present the business case tosupport your value. Dave Baldwin, in particular, suggested that the transformation being felt in graphic design might be an opportunity for those designers who are willing to “cross silos” and take an entrepreneurial approach.

If you’re interested in getting involved or learning more here is a list of organizations working to support and encourage creative economy. By no means is it exhaustive so please feel free to post any I may have left out.

Berkshire Creative www.berkshirecreative.org
Center for Creative Economy Winston-Salem/Greensboro, North Carolina
www.centerforcreativeeconomy.com
http://www.facebook.com/Center-for-Creative-Economy
Creative Albuquerque www.creativeabq.org
Creative Alliance Milwaukee http://www.creativealliancemke.org
Creative New Jersey www.creativenj.org
Creative Oklahoma stateofcreativity.com
Maine Center for Creativity www.mainecenterforcreativity.org
Mt. Auburn Associates has been profiling the creative economy since 2000. Reports from all of their work is on their website, www.mtauburnassociates.com
RTS, Inc, has been doing creative economy research since 2000. Reports are on their website, www.rtsinc.org