Surf’s Up, Condensed: Top Creativity Links for March 9, 2011

Photo courtesy of SXC.

The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest

This is a PDF link to a rather disturbing working paper disseminated by Harvard Business School. Co-authored by Francesca Gino, an associate professor in the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, the paper lists four studies conducted by the authors that would seem to provide evidence for an association between creativity and dishonest behavior.

13 Ways of Looking at a Story | Lateral Action

Mark McGuinness, a coach for artists, creatives and entrepreneurs, presents a lovely post that offers a baker’s dozen lenses through which to view a narrative. My favorites from the post include story as archetype, as trance induction, as an aid to memory and as a tool for transformation.

The 2011 Most Innovative Companies

Fast Company posts its list of the 50 businesses revolutionizing the world with their products and services. Among the top 10 this year are Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, Netflix and Zynga.

My Simplest Innovation Advice | Harvard Business Review

Scott Anthony, managing director of Innosight Ventures, discusses the magic behind one of the simplest creativity-sparking activities around — physically changing one’s location in a meeting room or shifting body position.

NEA: New look at survey reveals 3 of 4 Americans participate in the arts

This February 2011 news release from the National Endowment of the Arts explains that a new analysis of data from the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) reveals that nearly 75 percent of adults attended arts activities, created art, or engaged with art via electronic media. This is more than twice the share of adults (34.6 percent) who attended “benchmark” arts events such as jazz or classical music concerts, opera, plays, ballet, or who visited art museums or galleries. There is a strong relationship between arts attendance and creation: An American adult who creates or performs art is almost six times more likely to attend arts events than one who does not create or perform art.

The Emergence of the Nano-Budget Art Film

Kevin K Shah, writing on The Script Lab’s blog, discusses the shift from large production companies to tiny crews for narrative fiction films (as has been the case for a long time with documentaries). He asserts: “Great independent films (today and those of tomorrow) will have to be … low-cost, homegrown, self-marketed, and strategically and ingeniously promoted – all in conjunction & in collaboration with everyone involved in the production.”