Shigeru Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment. He’s the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator, and shuns focus groups: “As long as I can enjoy something, other people can enjoy it, too.”

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Links relating to SBJ's 'Where Good Ideas Come From'.

In this day and age, why would I do a PhD?Where is the wisdom and philosophy in today's Doctorate of Philosophy? What defense might the status have against commodified certification, credential inflation, and otherwise collaborative and crowd sourced knowledge? How might an autodidact approach a PhD with integrity? Would they?These are open questions looking for the heart and meaning of a PhD in today's context. Leigh will explain his approach to developing in-depth knowledge, and invite challenges, suggestions and responses to it...

The first phone book, published by the New Haven District Telephone Company in New Haven, Connecticut, appeared in February 1878. It contained 50 entries, a mix of individuals, government services, clubs, and most of all commercial enterprises. Phone numbers didn’t exist yet--at that point, if you had a phone, the operator at your local exchange knew who you were.

What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? On one level, these are obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful, and it's natural to try to understand it. On another level, looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history.

In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentation The Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing idea but how you execute the idea will determine your success.

In today’s era of high-speed communications and global connectivity it’s difficult to imagine a time when news traveled no faster than it could be delivered in person. After all, a message can now be sent around the world in less time than it takes to read this sentence. But as late as the 1860s the only way to transmit information across oceans was by ship, which meant weeks of lag time between sender and receiver. Naturally, the completion of the first sustainable transatlantic telegraph line (1866) redefined international communications—literally overnight. But like many so-called overnight sensations, the transatlantic cable was years in the making—twelve years to be exact. It took five attempts, the largest ship in the world and millions of dollars of capital to overcome the long list of catastrophes and human errors that plagued the project.

Just as an IQ test tracks intelligence, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking measures your CQ: how well you think creatively. Usually a 90-minute series of discrete tasks administered by a psychologist, the Torrance Test is not a perfect measure of creativity. But it has proven remarkably accurate in predicting creative accomplishments. We asked a group of ordinary children and adults to try their hands at several drawing tests: everyone was presented with incomplete line drawings and was given five minutes to turn them into pictures. We then sent a selection of the results to two well-known creativity scholars.

ne of Buckminster Fuller’s earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels—two up front, one in the back—and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.

Everyone wants to be like Steve Jobs and his powerhouse company. It's not as easy as it looks.

Nobody predicted this. The pioneers of political economy expected eventual stagnation. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Robert Malthus all predicted that diminishing returns would eventually set in, that the improvement in living standards they were seeing would peter out. “The discovery, and useful application of machinery, always leads to the increase of the net produce of the country, although it may not, and will not, after an inconsiderable interval, increase the value of that net produce,” said Ricardo, who perceived an inexorable tendency toward what he called a “stationary state.” John Stuart Mill, conceding that returns were showing no signs of diminishing in the 1840s, put it down to luck. Innovation, he said, was an external factor, a cause but not an effect of economic growth.

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

"Learning and using TRIZ can be very rewarding. While no two people are exactly alike in their motivation to learn and practice TRIZ, there are some immediate benefits that come with increased proficiency. One of the primary benefits is confidence to tackle difficult inventive problems and to raise the bar on products and services."

"When I worked as a corporate training consultant I was in charge of innovation training for many years. Despite the widespread interest in the topic it rarely got any real traction at the company I worked. In other words, while most of the executives of the company mention the term “innovation” in their public pronouncements and speeches, when they’d speak in private it had very little meaning to them. They supported innovation the same way Americans are raised to support “mom, apple pie and baseball.” They are good concepts but they have very “fuzzy” boundaries. It is hard to “get your mind around” any of them with regards to WHY they are important."

"It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online."

"Jason Rohrer's solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love."

"In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge."