Everything And Nothing

The Mother of Invention

Thomas A. Edison explained how he started his quest for an electric light to Forbes magazine on Oct. 16, 1920: "I was paying a sheriff $5 a day to postpone a judgment on my small factory. Then came the gas man, and because I could not pay his bill promptly, he cut off my gas. It made me so mad that I at once began to read up on gas technique and economics, and resolved I would try to see if electricity couldn't be made to replace gas."

Going with the Flow of the Creative Juices

10 Ways to Get the Creative Juices Flowing

Get Your Creative (Staffing) Juices Flowing

Creativity Un-Block

Unusual Approaches to Keeping the Creative Juices Flowing

Here are a few places designed to get the creative juices flowing.

The Bright Idea Deck - 78 cards deliberately designed to get your creative juices flowing

The Breakthrough Cafe - "Delicious food meets delicious food for thought"

Listmaking is a great way to get the creative juices flowing.

Guidelines to brainstorming - The road to creative ideas

Where creative juices flow in Tokyo

Journaling can get your creative juices flowing

Toys help too.

How to get a job in the creative industries.

EyeWire Creativity Cards

Getting Creative Pays

The $500,000 MacArthur awards for outstanding creativity have been announced.

From their Web site:

The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

The MacArthur Fellows Program is intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. In keeping with this purpose, the Foundation awards fellowships directly to individuals rather than through institutions. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. They may use their fellowship to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.

Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.

And I would tell you how to nominate yourself for the award next year, but you can't. You need to start sucking up now to their nominators. But they serve secret and confidential terms. So you might need to enlist the help of a spy.

See, you have to get creative just to get nominated. ;)

Innovation Index rises 18%, MTA reports

The Mississippi Technology Alliance (MTA) has released the results of the fourth-annual Innovation Index, a report that presents Mississippi science and technology indicators featuring innovation goals, baselines and an annual performance process.

"The index is up to 480 this year, an 18% increase over last year and a cumulative improvement of 60% from baseline," said Andy Taggart, president and CEO of MTA. "This represents another leap forward as we are nearly halfway to achieving our 10-year goals for a sound technology-based economy in Mississippi."

The 2005 index value of 480 is preliminary because the U.S. Census Bureau will not release the current data used to calculate the value-added per manufacturing employee ratio until after July.

The MTA said the improvement in 2005 was primarily attributable to increased amounts of industry and university research and development, more royalties reported from university patents and licenses and a small increase in the number of scientists and engineers as a portion of the total workforce.

The full Innovation Index report is available here. (via Mississippi Business Journal)

Mothers of Invention

Tamara Monosoft invented the TP Saver, a device that stops toddlers from unraveling toilet-paper rolls. Then she invented Mom Inventors, Inc., to guide other inventive moms through the challenges of bringing their inventions to life. Her company also licenses and sells products developed by mothers through the Mom Invented Store.

And it seems that necessity is the mother of invention. Marion Donovan Butler was the mom-inventor of the disposable diaper. (I wonder how many she washed out before the idea struck her?)