Category: Creativity

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Use the Force For Good

How many Star Wars classic lines can you recite?  Can you do the actions too?  To celebrate the release of Star Wars:  The Complete Saga on Blu-Ray, Lucasfilms has joined with Stand up to Cancer, the non-profit group that uses an innovative model that it calls ‘dream teams’ comprised of scientists,and other specialists  to tackle a  cancer problem. The campaign is aptly called “Use the Force for Good“.

Celebrities like Emma Stone, Seth Rogen, Andy Samberg, Jaime King and even Star Wars alum Samuel L Jackson are part of the campaign.  This ‘dream team’ acts out their favourite Star Wars lines and scenes, showing us that their goofiness is indeed our goofiness too.  And it’s okay to be in love with this iconic a brand.  They then leverage the Star Wars brand message to raise awareness (and donations) for cancer research.

Enjoy the video.  Which scene do you play the most often 🙂

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Creativity innovation

The World’s Most Innovative Companies

www.fastcompany.com

FastCompany just published its list of the 50 most innovative companies, 2011. Guess who’s 1st?  Yep, Apple.  2nd?  Bit of a suprise.  Twitter.  3rd?  Facebook.  Interesting, super interesting, that two of the top three are social media companies and the top one is driving a lot of today’s technology.  Groupon, Google, Netflix and Zynga (Farmville anyone?) also make it into the top ten.  (This list almost reads as social commentary.)

FastCompany evaluates thousands of companies around the world, across different industries, to come up with this prestigious list. This years list is an interesting reflection of how different business models will dominate in the following decades. Historically strong innovators businesses, like GE, Pepsico and IBM, are still on the list; however, absent are the North American auto manufactures who are fighting hard to innovate.

Check out the list. Dig into the links on some of the companies, especially those that aren’t familiar, like Canadian biofuels producer Enerkem. Creativity and innovation are critical to successful marketing.

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Creativity

Creativity: Do Schools Kill It?

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We’ve been doing some fun stuff in my classes this term around creativity, trying to open up the mind channel for innovative inspiration before we dive into the hard work of case discussions.  I think it’s been a fun way to start class and it’s reconnected many of the students in a small way each day to why they came to marketing in the first place:  because they like to create, because they were inspired to be inventive, original and leading edge in their thinking.

Sir Ken Robinson has some interesting thoughts on how schools are killing creativity and why creativity is critical to our society.  This jibes nicely with one of my favourite books:  A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.  Pink puts forward the idea that we will rely less on left brain jobs in the 21st century as these jobs increasingly become outsourced and automated (yes, even lawyering and accounting work) and consider the importance of being in touch with our right brains, teaching right brain skills like creativity and empathy.

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