Summary

The human brain is a prediction machine that normalizes the familiar and hunts for novelty – repetition suppression breeds indifference, driving an endless exploit-explore tradeoff. All creative output reduces to three operations on existing material: bending (warping the original), breaking (fragmenting and reassembling), and blending (merging multiple sources). Creativity is memory digested and rebuilt. The optimal zone is ~20% deviation from the familiar. Orgs that survive proliferate options, scout at varying distances from the known, and tolerate the high failure rate that real innovation demands.

“Creativity is the breaking of habits through originality.”

“You never know what the world needs and how it will receive it.”

Key Takeaways

Notes

1: New into the sun

1: To innovate is human

• Repetition suppression: brain normalizing to predict, save energy
• Familiarity breeds indifference
• Exploit explore tradeoff
• “Creativity is the breaking of habits through originality” Arthur Kessler
• Creativity is inherently social
• Drive to create the new

2: The brain alters what it already knows

• Study: two decades before new concept dominates in marketplace
• Creativity relies on memory
• 3 basic strategies for evolving ideas:
  • Bending: bent out of shape
  • Breaking: taken apart
  • Blending: 2+ sources merged
• Brain digests, rebuilds past memories
• Covert vs overt creativity: visible?
  • “Arts are the open source software of innovation”

3: Bending

• End of time illusion: false belief that everything has already been done
• In fact, everything is always evolving
• Eg. knives, umbrellas, music, etc.
• Language is mutable

4: Breaking

• Whole broken apart into units that can be rebuilt, reshaped
• Eg. movie montages, instant replays, time sharing → cloud computing

5: Blending

• Eg. blending terms, creole, biotech

6: Living in the beehive

• Creative bounds: shaped by:
  • Social context
  • Moment in history
  • Cultural norms
• Failure to adapt; too incremental:
  • Eg. RIM, Kodak
• Too much novelty:
  • Eg. universal language, world calendar, imperial units
• Study: 20% complexity is optimal for art (measured by arousal)
• Very few universal biological preferences

2: The creative mentality

7: Don’t glue down the pieces

• Don’t let convention be a constraint
• Eg. 1910s continental drift
• Creative destruction
• Kin selection → only in environments where teamwork is advantageous
• “Giants of the past… are the springboards of the present”

8: Proliferate options

• The more options generated, the better
• “The surest path to extinction is to over-invest in a single solution”
• Invest in a wide range of alt approaches
• Eg. Longitude + X prizes, Netflix algorithm

9: Scout to different distances

• “You never know what the world needs and how it will receive it”
• Generate a range of different ideas from different distances

10: Tolerate risk

• “The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time” - Thomas Edison
• Distrust your first solution

3: Cultivating creativity

11: The creative company

• Finding the border of the possible
• Sprinkle seeds broadly
  • Eg. Google’s graveyard
• Public’s appetite for change is growing
• Emphasize diversification, nimbleness

12: The creative school

• …*

13 Into the future

• Ability to run internal mental simulations is unmatched in the animal kingdom
• Closed-world assumption: in AI, assumes nothing happens outside environment