Information Overload
Posted by heatherrast on July 28th, 2008Greetings. This is my first post under the Insightsand Ingenuity blog. I’m pretty excited, I have to admit. I’m a voracious reader – I love to read most anything, save for current event material (I know! I’m such a philistine.) And while reading can, and has, done great things for my vocabulary and helps me set at least one good example for my three children, it presents one drawback.
The drawback, surprisingly, is information. In this sense, I mean a surplus of information. Bits and snatches and clumps of information, all swimming around in my head. Clogging my reader, gathering dust on my bookshelves and getting hi-lighted to death before retiring to my magazine baskets (yes, that’s plural).
I’m an analytical person with futuristic and strategic strengths (Thank you, Tom Rath and Strengthsfinder 2.0). That means that I read material and then establish a bunny trail to other material. This connects to that which might mean those and then we really have something! Most of the time, anyway.
So that’s what this blog is going to be about. A narrative (join the party, make it a dialogue!) about things I see, what I’ve read, stories I’ve heard, smart people I’ve learned from (and I work wtih a lot). Blended and mixed to serve up consumer insights with ingenuity and moxie. Read on!
Tags: Information Gathering, Leading, Problem Solving, Reading
I think the foundation of innovation has been influenced by the people and experiences around us throughout human history. As humans we can’t help but look around us and observe what others are doing to help us fill needs in our lives. Because technology has advanced to the point where communicating ideas and collaborating on projects is almost a trivial matter, there are a lot more floating around. There are so many easily accessible ideas that it may seem like everything has already been thought of, but ultimately, I think it’s context and interpretation that makes ideas original.
Your question brings to mind the huge controversy over creative mash-ups/remixes and copyright. If you take someone else’s work and flip it on its head to reframe the perspective of the audience, whose work is it? Is it the original artist because she built the foundation or does it become the reframer’s work because he changed its intrinsic nature? The reason why this is a huge issue is because it’s *not* clear who has “ownership” of the creative idea at that point. I would argue that the work is original in both cases.
From The Origin of Ideas, 2008/07/16 at 3:01 PM
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