Cult of Innovation

Everyone wants to know the secret to inspiration.  Is it just a few lucky moments where the right amount of sleep, coffee, and serotonin come together?  Or can we teach ourselves to conjure up more great ideas whenever we want to?

According to this article from one of our favorite blogs about ideas, 99%, routines, systems, and spontaneity are the three core processes you must engage in to increase your “aha” moments.

Did you know that baseball’s top players miss 70% of their at-bat attempts? What Babe Ruth, PayPal, Steve Jobs, and this year’s World Series can tell us about the role of resilience and innovation in the face of adversity, from BusinessWeek.

When we think of creativity, we tend to think of great artists and geniuses such as Shakespeare or Einstein—people blessed with a rare mix of nearly supernatural talent, training, and opportunity. By doing, so, however, we limit our definition of creativity and prevent ourselves from appreciating our own potential.

According to Carlin Flora in an article in Psychology Today, we are actually more creative in our daily lives than we realize and can actually learn to tap into and build up our innovative abilities in many ways.

Ali Pulver, an artist and grad student at Pratt in Brooklyn, NYC came up with a cool solution for those of us who love to eat where ever and whenever we can.  She’s created Pop Up Lunch, a series of “mobile eating devices” that transform nontraditional public spaces into surfaces such as the “Lunch Shelf” and the “Hydrantable”  that may allow us to feel a little more civilized while noshing on our kebobs, knishes, or kolaches.

The human senses—taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight—are senses most of us are born with, but can a device actually give us the illusion of a sixth sense?

In this exciting talk from TED, Pattie Maes proposes a wearable device that sees what you see and can analyze it quicker than you can pull out a laptop or even a phone. Watch the presentation here to see how this will be in our midst sooner than you think!

Here, you’ll find posts on all things innovative. The term “innovative” is slapped on just about anything these days. It’s an inspiring yet elusive concept. What makes something innovative? How can we ourselves become more innovative? How do we create that culture where innovation thrives? There is no silver bullet to innovation but there’s inspiration all around us. Here, we’ll be sharing the concepts, ideas, thoughts and the occasional invention with you.

The Cult (as we like to call it) is curated and published by the digital artisans at Arc90. If you’re familiar with any of our lab experiments, you’ll notice that we’re always striving to create interesting and innovative tools.

If you’d like to keep tabs on the cult, be sure to follow our Twitter feed and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Finally, if you’ve got something innovative to share – a product, an idea, a thought – really anything that gives the status quo a swift kick in the butt, be sure to share it with us.