Creativity is in. Seminars teach employees to “think outside the box” and release their inner Picasso. Managers preach innovation, and today’s rich and powerful prefer to describe themselves as creative heroes, valiantly besting the naysayers to bring us the radical changes that add up to progress. Richard Florida’s best-selling The Rise of the Creative Class argues that societal progress increasingly comes from places like New York and San Francisco, in part because those cities encourage creativity by embracing bohemian self-expression and openness to diversity in dress, speech, or even sexuality.

Despite this affirming chorus, much of the hoopla over creativity is a crock. Why? Because we are already up to our eyeballs in it. Make no mistake: Innovation matters. Nothing is more essential for long-term economic growth. But to get more innovation we may want less, not more, creativity.

The sobering truth is that the dramatic artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking “creativity” matter little for economic growth. Creative new clothes or music may change fashion, but are soon eclipsed by newer fashions. Large and lasting economic innovations, like steam engines or cell phones, are rare and tend to be independently “invented” by many people. One less visionary would matter little.

Instead, the innovations that matter most are the millions of small changes we constantly make to our billions of daily procedures and arrangements. Such changes do not require free-spirited self-expression. Instead, people quite naturally think of changes as they go about their routine business and social lives.

IN FACT, HUMANS GENERATE far more suggestions than we could ever possibly pursue. We throw away most ideas, while those we do bother to mention are rarely pursued. Almost everyone has suggestions they think were unfairly ignored. This is not because of evil conformism; given our limited resources, it simply could not be otherwise.

Where’s the biggest surplus? All those “big ideas.” After all, big changes take even more resources to pursue, and people long to be creative heroes celebrated for their big ideas. It seems every actor wants to direct, every musician wants creative control, and every manager wants to be a CEO.

Such striving for creativity can actually reduce innovation. Vying for creative credit, people routinely neglect good ideas “not invented here.” And they often join the crowd behind a new idea just to declare their creativity, which distracts them from really trying to make that new idea work.

To succeed in academia, my graduate students and I had to learn to be less creative than we were initially inclined to be. Critics complain that schools squelch creativity, but most people are inclined to be more creative on the job than would be truly productive. So schooling is mostly about selecting the smarter and more diligent, and learning to show up day after day to somewhat boring jobs with ambiguous instructions.

What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.

We laugh at our ancestors who believed in “trial by combat” because God made morally virtuous people physically stronger. But our myth of creativity similarly associates creativity with moral virtue. Artistic achievement is thought to require deep, almost spiritual self-awareness. Indeed, Richard Florida says creativity favors “individuality, self-expression, acceptance of difference, and the desire for rich multidimensional experiences” instead of “homogeneity, conformity, and ‘fitting in.”‘ Creativity is said to come not to those who try to control it, but to those who let it control them.

This is a Star Wars vision of innovation: “Feel the force, Luke; let go of your conscious self and act on instinct.” And it is just as much a fantasy as that celluloid serial. Innovation is no more about releasing your inner bohemian than it is about holding hands, singing Kumbaya, and believing in innovation.

In truth, we don’t need more suggestion boxes or more street mimes to fill people with a spirit of creativity. We instead need to better manage the flood of ideas we already have and to reward managers for actually executing them.

Previous: Is GMU professor Robin Hanson an inventor, an innovator, or… a complete loser??

Previous Blog Posts On “Great Ideas”: X Groups & X Universes + Incite the free-market thinkers into *practicing* prediction markets. + How prediction exchanges can best encourage participation + The Open Institute of Prediction Markets + Decision-making tool vs. decision-aid tool — Decision markets + Prediction markets timeline + CBS News Andy Rooney: Let’s Have A Smart Board.

Robin Hanson has posted this comment:

I’ll take credit for creating some ideas the world has found useful, but I have completely failed both the market test and the academic test. That is, I can’t convince any business to let me join them to deliver my ideas at scale, and I can’t convince any top journal to publish my ideas.

The comment was made on this Mike Linksvayer‘s blog post:

QUOTE

Invention versus innovation

Will this post get Chris Masse to stop bothering me for a promised post on invention vs. innovation?

Many people have written on this, a few recent links, not all precisely relevant to the question.

One way of putting it is that six billion people generate a huge number of ideas, some number of which could be called inventions. Most are hopeless (the inventions; the people at least manage to survive for a time). Most of the rest are not actively pursued. The only way to test whether an invention is hopeless or useful is to attempt to deliver it at scale. So innovators (think of them as idea entrepreneurs, or whatever) both figure out which inventions are not hopeless and deliver the useful ones at scale. Innovators create all of the surplus, inventors do little more than breathe.

I’ve had an idea in my head for a few years that Masse recently mentioned in passing (not the moronic one he has recently written at length about). Have I done anything with the idea? No. Without implementation the idea is worthless.

Read Robin Hanson’s short The Myth Of Creativity article. Excerpt:

What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.

Do read the whole thing. Hanson’s target is slightly different than mine.

Before Masse calls me a Robin Hanson fan-boy again (I don’t mind), I’ll pose the obvious question: how much of an innovator is Hanson? He’s clearly a fantastic ideas person, but ideas don’t matter. He seems a more productive innovator than the average academic, but that bar is probably very low.

A recent and very apropos Seth Godin post on Meeting Needs spurred me to finally write this. Godin:

Almost no new idea meets the needs of shareholders and CEOs. That’s because most of all they need predictability and apparent freedom from risk. This is why public companies are almost always on the road to disaster. They flee from change in order to do what they think is meeting the needs of those constituents. They fight changes in laws, policies, technologies and markets because their CEO (especially) wants a nice even flight pattern while he racks up big time options.

Shrink wrap software feels safe. Secure. Supported. Beyond reproach.

But…

It turns out that open source can do a brilliant job of meeting their actual needs (lower overhead to install and maintain, higher productivity to use, more stable over time) but the problem is that apparent needs (playing it safe, making your boss happy) almost always get in the way. Until it’s too late. When it’s too late, the competition has leapfrogged you.

Godin also mentions blogging, read the full post. One could substitute prediction markets for open source or blogging. Put that in your marketing pipe and smoke it, Mr. Chris Masse.

END OF QUOTE

(((Emphasis added by Chris Masse.)))

Previous Blog Posts On “Great Ideas”: X Groups & X Universes (Mike tells me in an e-mail that it’s the concept of X Universes that he rates as “moronic”. What I will remind him is that it’s Robin Hanson who invented the imagination-based prediction markets, a.k.a. X Universes.) + Incite the free-market thinkers into *practicing* prediction markets. + How prediction exchanges can best encourage participation + The Open Institute of Prediction Markets + Decision-making tool vs. decision-aid tool — Decision markets + Prediction markets timeline + CBS News Andy Rooney: Let’s Have A Smart Board.

Google Inc. looks for ideas that are “really crazy” when sizing up potential purchases, the Internet company’s top dealmaker said. “We look at everything very carefully,” Salman Ullah, Google’s director of corporate development, said yesterday in a speech at a meeting of the Los Angeles Venture Association. “The really crazy ones do really well.” [...] “The crazy ones mean they ignore the usual restraints of investment levels required or design parameters or ‘Gee I need more servers than anyone ever thought was possible’,” Ullah said. “When you free yourselves from these constraints, you create crazy, cool things.” Google wants companies that can build revenue streams from their users, instead of buying firms with a lot of users that don’t bring in much in sales, Ullah said. “We don’t do traffic for traffic’s sake,” he said. “It has to be highly monetizable.” [...]

Previous Totally Crazy Ideas: X Groups & X Universes + Incite the free-market thinkers into *practicing* prediction markets. + How prediction exchanges can best encourage participation + The Open Institute of Prediction Markets + Decision-making tool vs. decision-aid tool — Decision markets + Prediction markets timeline + CBS News Andy Rooney: Let’s Have A Smart Board.

Let’s Have A Smart Board
Andy Rooney On Why College Professors Should Advise
Dec. 26, 2004

Some days, I have the nervous feeling that too few people who aren’t smart enough are making too many important decisions in Washington. They always sound confident, but I’ll bet they’d like some help, too.

There are 1,500 colleges in the United States and one million college professors. Both the colleges and the professors run from terrible to great, but overall, they’re among the best things we have in this country.

I do have one reservation, and they won’t like to hear me say this, but a lot of college professors don’t work hard enough. The school year is too short. It has too many interruptions. Our best professors aren’t doing their share with the brains they have and I have an idea. We should involve the brightest people among us, college professors, in the most important work we have: government.

Instead of sitting on the sidelines in funny costumes, just thinking and talking about what’s wrong, college professors should do something. We would establish a new government agency called The Smart Board. It would be an advisory group comprising a body of 100 college professors, all with PhDs. They wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the rest of us. They’d be chosen by the people who know them best – other college professors.

We’d put up a new building for them in Washington. When television does a piece about the president, the reporter stands in front of the White House. When it’s about Congress, the reporter has the Capitol in the background. The professors’ new building would give television correspondents something to stand in front of when they reported on them.

It would be a full-time job for two years. After talking things over, they’d give their best advice to Congress and to the president. It wouldn’t be compulsory for officials to take it, but the board’s opinion would be made public and that would put pressure on politicians. For example, if the professors had advised against attacking Iraq, it would have been harder for the president to do that.

The professors would give Congress and the president their best advice on whether or not they should pass a new tax decrease that leaves no rich person behind.

Members of the Smart Board wouldn’t be Republican, and they wouldn’t be Democrat. They’d be too smart to be either.

Written By Andy Rooney © MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

What I want to demonstrate by re-publishing this 2004 proposal by Andy Rooney is that a great idea can be expressed simply. I’ll try to remember this while dealing with some new prediction market concepts. Thank you, mister Andy Rooney. And I’ll retract the “old schmuck” label.

(((I think that Robin Hanson’s PhD work was about something like “new institution design” but I don’t remember where the hell I read that.)))