Creativity and Curation at Future Midwest 2011

Last year I walked away from Future Midwest armed with new knowledge and inspired by passionate speakers. This year's edition provided more of the same. The conference took place last Thursday and Friday. Quite a few of the people here at Yaffe attended. We plan to get together soon and compare notes and what we gleaned and how we can use it for our clients. In the meantime, here's a couple nuggets I picked up from this year's speakers.

Creativity has become the currency of success. In his opening keynote address, Josh Linkner, former CEO of ePrize and author of Disciplined Dreaming, talked about creativity in whatever you do is the key to success these days. That's something I've believed for some time, but he brought it into clarity. He pointed out that while GM & Chrysler were taking bailouts and going bankrupt, Ford doubled down on innovation – and you can see how well they're doing now as a result of that. Faster and faster, new companies are knocking off old ones. The time has come for all of us to double down on creativity and innovation.

Conversely, Josh talked about the Creativity Crisis, highlighted in last July's Newsweek magazine. He pointed to legos – at one time they were about creativity – you made stuff, tore it down and made something new. Now, they come with huge booklets to build something like a death-star, that you build once and put on the shelf. The most alarming statistic he gave us: if you ask kindergartners if they think they're creative, almost all of them will say yes. If you ask recent graduates if they are, only 2% of them say they're creative.

Some of this lack of thinking we're creative has to do with only certain professions being seen as "creative" and some has to do with people being afraid to put themselves out there and speak their ideas out loud.As a leader, it’s your job to foster that creativity in all your staff. Foster your team into being a jazz combo rather than a structured orchestra where everyone ridgedly plays their part. Awaken curiosity. That is the building blocks of creativity.

Curation is the next big thing. A number of speakers spoke about curation. Oliver Starr, of Pearltrees, defined curation as the selection of, care for and presentation of whatever group you are curating. Aggregation is not curation. Curation needs to be organized – more like a museum than a warehouse. Almost everyone is a curator of some sort and it's changing the way we view the web.

Curation helps you better find what you really want. Search engines are starting to break down, are easily gamed, have too much content and are controlled by the few search giants. Curation dramatically improves your content by adding context, opinion, nuances and other factors that make the content more relevant to you. It allows you to produce meaningful insight without having to depend completely on your own content. And if you make it easy for your audience to curate the content you create, you become a part of a larger conversation.

Oliver went on to list a number of tools you can use to aid in curating the content you find interesting or relevant. One very interesting one, was his own Pearltrees tool that allows you to create your own content tree around the factors that are relevant to your brand or site. Embedding that tree into your site also adds to your SEO juice. Other tools he mentioned include Storify, BagTheWeb, CuratedBy and KeepStream.

Michael Morin, EVP & Lover of Knowledge