Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

by Bruce Nussbaum

Overview

Offering insights from the spheres of anthropology, psychology, education, design, and business, Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, a leading thinker, commentator, and curator on the subjects of design, creativity, and innovation, is first book to identify and explore creative intelligence as a new form of cultural literacy and as a powerful method for problem-solving, driving innovation, and sparking start-up capitalism.

Nussbaum investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their creative intelligence — CQ—and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. Ultimately, Creative Intelligence shows how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original and highly social. 

Smart and eye opening, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire illustrates how to connect our creative output with a new type of economic system, Indie Capitalism, where creativity is the source of value, where entrepreneurs drive growth, and where social networks are the building blocks of the economy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062088420
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/05/2013
Pages:	351
Sales rank:	861,179
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bruce Nussbaum, former assistant managing editor for BusinessWeek, is professor of innovation and design at Parsons School of Design and an award-winning writer. He is founder of the Innovation & Design online channel, and IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly innovation magazine, and blogs at Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. Nussbaum is responsible for starting BusinessWeek's coverage of the annual International Design Excellence Award and the World's Most Innovative Companies survey. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He taught third-grade science in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer.

Table of Contents

Part I Reclaiming Our Creativity

1 Strokes of Genius Are Not What They Seem 3

2 The Search for the Secrets of Creativity 11

Part II The Five Competencies of Creative Intelligence

3 Knowledge Mining 43

4 Framing 85

5 Playing 117

6 Making 147

7 Pivoting 177

Part III The Economic Value of Creativity

8 Indie Capitalism 223

9 What's Your CQ? 251

Epilogue: Rethinking Creativity 263

Notes 267

Index 337

What People are Saying About This

David Kelley

“Bruce Nussbaum demystifies one of the most important initiatives of our time — unlocking the creativity within ourselves and our organizations.”

Daniel H. Pink

“Bruce Nussbaum is one of America’s most interesting design minds. His latest work is both a clarion call and a guidebook for moving creativity to the center of our lives.”

Richard Florida

“Creative Intelligence lays out the forces that will drive us toward a prosperous future. Read this book if you want to be inspired and provoked to lead the way.”

Beth Comstock

“In Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the economic and cultural power of creativity and offers practical tools and applications for enhancing it in any organization.”

Editorial Reviews

In an unstable job market, many of us struggle to keep our skills current and marketable. To that end, Nussbaum, professor at the Parsons School of Design and a former Businessweek editor, brings us both good and bad news. The bad news is that a survey of 1,500 CEOs revealed that the most valuable management skill was no longer marketing or operations but creativity, a new literacy that employees will need to stay competitive. The good news is that these skills can be learned. Nussbaum dedicates much of the book to five practices that help individuals nurture and develop prized creative skills: knowledge mining, framing, playing, making, and pivoting. Latter sections of the book explore the economic value of creativity. The author shows the faulty thinking behind, and consequences of, the triumph of finance over product creation. More importantly, he offers a viable economic model, which suggests that creativity is a source of economic value, entrepreneurs drive growth, capitalism is a social movement, and social networks are the basic building blocks of the economy. This is a refreshing, informative, and groundbreaking new work that has implications for every level of the business arena. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Bruce Nussbaum demystifies one of the most important initiatives of our time — unlocking the creativity within ourselves and our organizations.” — David Kelley, Founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school

“An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently under debate.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Creative Intelligence lays out the forces that will drive us toward a prosperous future. Read this book if you want to be inspired and provoked to lead the way.” — Richard Florida, Professor, University of Toronto and NYU and Senior Editor, The Atlantic

“Bruce Nussbaum is one of America’s most interesting design minds. His latest work is both a clarion call and a guidebook for moving creativity to the center of our lives.” — Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell is Human, Drive, and A Whole New Mind

“In Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the economic and cultural power of creativity and offers practical tools and applications for enhancing it in any organization.” — Beth Comstock, SVP, Chief Marketing Officer, GE

“This is a refreshing, informative, and groundbreaking new work that has implications for every level of the business arena.” — Publishers Weekly

“Thought-provoking insight on the important topic of creativity.” — Booklist

From the Publisher

Creative Intelligence lays out the forces that will drive us toward a prosperous future. Read this book if you want to be inspired and provoked to lead the way.

Richard Florida

Bruce Nussbaum demystifies one of the most important initiatives of our time — unlocking the creativity within ourselves and our organizations.

David Kelley

In Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the economic and cultural power of creativity and offers practical tools and applications for enhancing it in any organization.

Beth Comstock

Thought-provoking insight on the important topic of creativity.

Booklist

Bruce Nussbaum is one of America’s most interesting design minds. His latest work is both a clarion call and a guidebook for moving creativity to the center of our lives.

Daniel H. Pink

Thought-provoking insight on the important topic of creativity.

Booklist

Former BusinessWeek assistant managing editor Nussbaum (Innovation and Design/Parson School of Design; Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against Aids, 1990, etc.) makes the case that the future of American capitalism lies in unleashing creativity. The author believes that students can be trained to become creative and that it is a skill that can be assessed. He combines lessons from the "personal growth movement of the 1960s and '70s" and observations about how successful enterprises harness creativity and team effort (e.g., Google, Apple and Facebook). Nussbaum also proposes supplementing the standard IQ measure with what he calls a creativity quotient. In the author's view, today's dominant model of capitalism, based on the hegemony of "efficient market theory" (which makes short-term profit the main criteria for investment), was responsible for the recent recession and has "taken a devastating toll on innovation." The author compares this to the period from 1933 to 1976, "a time when business leaders were responsible not simply to shareholders, but to many stakeholders." The author believes that in order to compete globally, American business must pick up from the 1990s, when U.S. global hegemony was based on the inventiveness of Silicon Valley and futurists predicted major advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. He offers a radical model for investment in technology startups based on local sources of financing and the possibilities of broad-based online social networking. Such an economy would embrace risk-taking, see uncertainty as opportunity and require minimal government intervention. Education would be transformed to emphasize hands-on creative activity, and students would be encouraged to wed ideas to their implementation. An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently under debate.

Kirkus Reviews