Peter Diamandis and Dan Sullivan discuss strategies to drive creativity in an organization.
- Most organizational executives are older. However, historically, creativity comes at a younger age.
- ie- Nobel laureates do the bulk of their prize winning work in their late 20’s.
- When NASA was a young organization in the 60’s, the average engineer was in their 20’s, and from that came striking innovation. No one to limit their thinking.
- Since then, the average NASA age has doubled.
- Early .com bubble followed the same pattern.
- There is a corporate age bias, and being youthful and naive can be an important attribute.
- Youth also prevents bias of legacy issues that they are ignorant to. They don’t self censor.
- In large organizations, the entrepreneurial are shut down early on and burn out.
- National Institute of Health now gives more grants to 70 year old researchers than 20.
- Fear of failure drives this regression to the uncreative.
- Innovation comes from risk and naivity.
- First human driver – curiosity.
- Fear as the second driver.
- Wealth creation is 3.
- Significance is 4 – people will die and risk all to feel significant.
- “find something you would die for and live for it.”
- How you announce a big bold idea is critical to its existence. It can create an energy that will feed the idea to success.
- Even team announcements matter.
- Darwin spoke of evolutionary pressures. Genetic evolution occurred rapidly in smaller populations. Or in geographic isolation. Finally, rapid environmental change.
- The above is true for ideas and services.
- The threat of competition is a prime example of the rapid environmental change above – disruption.
- A corporate example of this was Steve Jobs pulling a small Macintosh team, and geographically isolated them.