Thursday’s Big Idea
Today's Big Idea: Creative Cross-Pollination
One of the happy byproducts of globalization is that it creates all kinds of unlikely encounters. When cultures, ideas, and ways of doing business bump up against one another, creative solutions result.
The emerging psychology and neuroscience of creativity support these claims, demonstrating, for example, that creative teams composed partly of "outsiders" and partly of former partners produce more successful creative work than teams that are too closely-knit or too far-flung. Outsiders seem to provide insight and creative tension that bring new ideas to light.
Businesses and governments can benefit from conscious cross-pollination of ideas by remaining open, for example, to management concepts from entirely different sectors. This approach has enabled US agencies like the FDA and Homeland Security to solve some of their most vexing problems.
