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Tag Archives: Ideas_from_Strange_Places

The Creative Drumbeat

  By Fred H. Schlegel | March 14, 2011 - 8:41 pm |
14 Comments

Warning – I’m tying together a few loose ends here. Things may get tangled. The application of scientific process to business practice has been one of the critical drivers in the success of modern enterprise. Observe, hypothesize, measure, analyze, apply, repeat. It drives efficiency and progress. Unfortunately things get dicey at the edges. There is an art to being a breakthrough business, in being able to observe the unobservable. Sometimes our ability to envision surpasses our ability to measure. Sometimes you just have to leap. “Leave space for things to come to you,” says Janice Cartier in her discussion of artistic process. In a way, creativity’s feeling of random discovery is a scientific process we have not yet come to terms with. Robin Dickenson commented that for him the creative and scientific processes were modes of thinking that can be switched between. Kay Plantes commented that both the scientific and … Continue reading →

Creative Approaches

  By Fred H. Schlegel | September 20, 2010 - 9:37 pm | ,
2 Comments

Creative approaches can come from unexpected directions. Today I was to teach a bit about entrepreneurial creativity in class, but had the chance for a real lesson an hour before. Carmen Benavente, author of Embroiderers of Ninhue: Stitching Chilean Rural Life, spoke at Indiana University today about her experiences in Chile. In 1971 at a time of turmoil in Chile she found herself back in her home region.  Surprised and frightened at the fear and mistrust she encountered upon arrival, she spent the night thinking over an idea – to invite the women of town to meet and share and learn embroidery. I found her story compelling, in part because of how quickly a creative impulse could catch fire. “Stitches afford a vocabulary for the designs,” said Carmen Benavente. The women were hesitant at first, saying they couldn’t even draw a straight line. But by the second day many in … Continue reading →

The 2400 Year Old Problem

  By Fred H. Schlegel | April 6, 2010 - 5:12 pm |
9 Comments

I love my excursions down to Indiana University. I’m always pleasantly surprised by the level of creativity, passion and dedication that survives (and perhaps thrives) after years of schooling. (Disclosure: This be a proud papa moment…) This weekend my daughter’s adaptation of  Aristophanes’ “The Wasps” hit the streets and it struck me how familiar the problems of our ancient greek cousins were. Having spent the past four years studying ancient history and theater, that was Sarah K Schlegel’s point of course and her goal in producing the play for a modern audience. We know we should learn from the past, but, oh so often, it seems so far away. Turns out Aristophanes felt he lived in a very litigious society. Sound familiar? So much so that he said lawyers had become like wasps, stinging with suits at every opportunity and swarming from victim to victim without serious care as to the … Continue reading →

Filtering Ideas – Yodeling Pickle

  By Fred H. Schlegel | January 18, 2010 - 6:00 am |
6 Comments

How many ideas have you rejected this week? It’s tough to keep track given the velocity they come at us. (Heck, we get bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information including 100,000 words a day, not to mention what we think up for ourselves.) As children most of us were thoroughly trained to censor our thoughts before letting go with the ridicule inducing comment. (The Cubs are going to win the pennant! – ah, some of us never learn.) This sometimes serves us well. In the world of ideas it can be deadly. Ideas are fragile things in business. Any number of stray comments, poor politics, and concerted efforts at logic can drive a good idea (and it’s conceiver) into the mud. Problem is, most of the tools we use early on to sift through ideas are little more than personal opinion. But decisions must be made and so politics end … Continue reading →

Planning for Serendipity – Taking Flight

  By Fred H. Schlegel | December 17, 2009 - 11:49 am | ,
15 Comments

From the ideas from strange places department: So, if Wilber and Orville had decided to open a different kind of shop to pay the bills, let’s say a bakery for example, would they have flown today in 1903? (That would be December 17th, 1903) “While most engineers assumed that a successful aircraft would need to be inherently stable, as bicycle builders the Wrights made their living building vehicles that were inherently unstable.” NOVA Wright Brother’s Flying Machine (Currently on Hulu.com) The bike shop turned out to the the perfect training ground for the first successful aeronautic engineers. The leap concerning stability – …led to a focus on control – …onto a critical insight about wing warping which came when Wilber reached for a cardboard box containing an inexpensive tire tube. From giving a box a helical twist to steering a biplane. Serendipity. But as with all serendipitous moments (and most … Continue reading →