Profit is No Longer in just selling potatoes. Creative Initiatives

Left brain: I am the left brain. I am a sci­ent­ist. A math­em­atician. I love the famil­iar. I cat­egor­ize. I am accur­ate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am prac­tical. Always in con­trol. A mas­ter of words and lan­guage. Realistic. I cal­cu­late equa­tions and play with num­bers. I am order. I am logic. I know exactly who i am.

Right brain: I am the right brain. I am cre­ativ­ity. A free spirit. I am pas­sion. Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roar­ing laughter. I am taste. The feel­ing of sand beneath bare feet. I am move­ment. Vivid col­ors. I am the urge to paint on an empty can­vas. I am bound­less ima­gin­a­tion. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel. I am everything i wanted to be.

The best or noth­ing – nobody wants to be noth­ing! However, if we look closer at the product hid­ing under that advert­ise­ment, we would find the unbe­liev­able German pre­ci­sion and accur­acy. If not the col­ors catch­ing our eye, we may even get con­fused in our search for an answer to a ques­tion: “what exactly is „the best“?. So what is this advert­ise­ment for? Could it be that Mercedes-​Benz is abandon­ing its well deserved name? Or maybe the product cre­ated by many engin­eers for years and a long time sym­bol of qual­ity is now becom­ing a sym­bol of com­fort, free­dom of move­ment and beauty? Possibly, there is a reason why it is rep­res­en­ted by the brain. I see both: a story being told and an indic­ator which meas­ures the level of cus­tomer satisfaction.

In any case, this ad con­vinced me once again that it is now fash­ion­able to be cre­at­ive. I am sure that Mercedes-​Benz like every­one else is try­ing to exploit cre­ativ­ity. Profit is no longer in the “pota­toes“ from a well cul­tiv­ated field or in the qual­ity of a product alone. Growth of media is one of reas­ons why profit now is closer asso­ci­ated with selling and ser­vices than it ever was before. Innovation and cre­ativ­ity now are the main driv­ing forces of the mod­ern eco­nomy. Designer edu­ca­tion today include not only busi­ness strategy but entre­pren­eur­ship as well; edu­ca­tion sys­tems are going through sub­stan­tial trans­form­a­tions since the con­tem­por­ary edu­ca­tion sys­tem fails to „pro­duce“ pro­fes­sion­als who meet the stand­ards sought after by the mod­ern labor mar­ket. Ken Robinson is one of the first to openly cri­ti­cize edu­ca­tion sys­tems, say­ing that they are the ones sup­press­ing cre­ativ­ity. In the fol­low­ing film, he is ques­tion­ing the pos­sib­il­it­ies of align­ing todays edu­ca­tion with demands of the future and the pos­sib­il­ity of teach­ing „out –of-​the– box“ think­ing which is so import­ant in the fast chan­ging environment.

http://​youtu​.be/​h​k​P​v​S​C​q​5​ZXk

So what is import­ant today if a mono­gam­ous think­ing has already been out­dated? New cre­at­ive ini­ti­at­ives. When I am talk­ing about new cre­at­ive ini­ti­at­ives, I mean everything that can be cre­ated using dif­fer­ent media: graph­ics, body, inform­a­tion tech­no­lo­gies, news, IPS struc­tures, pro­gram­ming lan­guages, etc.- everything that can bring you joy and develop some­thing new and use­ful. It‘s been a long time when mono­gam­ous pro­jects were being cre­ated, nowadays everything is cre­ated by employ­ing mul­tiple tech­niques, which even­tu­ally come together into one multi-​layered product. The goal is to bring together dif­fer­ent artists and dif­fer­ent tech­no­lo­gies, to expand the cap­ab­il­it­ies of art and pub­li­cize the res­ult via vari­ous channels.

The Creators Project.

Another way to cre­ate some­thing new is a „make a change“ move­ment and work of an entre­pren­eur which eco­nom­ist Jean-​Baptiste Say defines as: “The entre­pren­eur shifts eco­nomic resources out of lower and into higher pro­ductiv­ity and greater yield.”

Theoretically, entre­pren­eur­ship is asso­ci­ated with excep­tional abil­it­ies to notice new oppor­tun­it­ies, ded­ic­a­tion, self-​motivation and will­ing­ness to take great risks. One of the best known examples is Steve Jobs who believed that innov­a­tion goes hand in hand with a social change. Everyone is famil­iar with his gar­age story and the story of the first Macintosh cre­ated in the dark stor­age room with the help of a few friends. None of them hoped that in a short future, this product will bring bil­lions. It seemed impossible.

Steve Jobs (left) and Steve Wozniak. They cre­ated Apple. Who would have thought?

Grasshopper​.com is another great example. They are def­in­itely cre­at­ive entre­pren­eurs and so are their cli­ents. They‘ve cre­ated a product for entre­pren­eurs. The vir­tual phone sys­tem designed for entre­pren­eurs helps small busi­ness sound more pro­fes­sional and stay con­nec­ted. Unlike the tra­di­tional call­ing sys­tem, Grasshopper​.com func­tions only online and does not require any addi­tional hard­ware or soft­ware. Grasshoper​.com has already served 100,000 cus­tom­ers, and their num­ber keeps grow­ing every day.

Another charm­ing fea­ture of Grasshopper​.com is the fact that they encour­age their cus­tom­ers‘ growth. They do not try to pamper their cus­tom­ers but motiv­ate them to become the best they can be. There are plenty of Grasshopper‘s motiv­a­tional videos which are ded­ic­ated to encour­aging indi­vidu­als to work towards their goals. Rumors have it that Jazzy had only good words to say about this par­tic­u­lar video.

Expanding the sub­ject — people who do not believe in cap­it­al­ism pro­cesses and are motiv­ated mostly by self­less­ness and altru­ism are called social entre­pren­eurs. One of the best known rep­res­ent­at­ives is Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, an insti­tu­tion that provides micro­cre­dit (small loans to poor people pos­sess­ing no col­lat­eral) to help its cli­ents estab­lish cred­it­wor­thi­ness and fin­an­cial self-​sufficiency.

Another example worth fol­low­ing is Robert Redford, a film dir­ector and pro­du­cer, who aban­doned his career in 1980 to leave space for new­comers. He cre­ated Sundance Institute — a plat­form designed to sup­port and develop young artists‘ ini­ti­at­ives. He invited 10 begin­ning artists to Utah and asked them to cre­ate movies they liked even if they did not meet Hollywood stand­ards. The next step was „Sundance Film Festival“, ded­ic­ated for the pub­li­city of such ini­ti­at­ives. Today Sundance is one of the biggest of inde­pend­ent film festivals.

Sundance Film Festival 2011. Copyright: Fred Hayes

Sundance Film Festival. Copyright: Sandria Miller

There are a lot more sim­ilar examples. Some people cre­ate star­tups like products. Jesse Middleton is a CEO of three suc­cess­ful busi­ness ini­ti­at­ives in New York. At the age of 25, he foun­ded three com­pan­ies sur­viv­ing from each oth­ers resources: GuyHaus –deliv­ery of goods for men, GetMinders – a ser­vice for the eld­erly which enables them to stay on top of their health by using simple phone calls and text mes­sages and WeWork Labs – a great space for entre­pren­eurs to build their own product.

Jesse Middleton

However, while the world goes crazy for star­tups, every­one who‘s look­ing for new ideas, can take a part in 54 hour mara­thons called „Start Up Weekends“. People who think alike gather in these meet­ings and accord­ing their web­site, roughly 80% of par­ti­cipants plan on con­tinu­ing work­ing with their team or star­tup after the weekend.

„Global Entrepreneurship Week”, which kicked off in 2008, launched by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Carl Schramm, the pres­id­ent and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is sched­uled to occur this year in November 14–20. Since then, it has grown to 118 coun­tries and dir­ectly engages an aver­age of 5.9 mil­lion people each year.

Finally, I’m encour­aging you, the cre­ator, — keep cre­at­ing! Combine your cap­ab­il­it­ies with other ini­ti­at­ives, let the cre­ativ­ity express itself in the new forms, develop open think­ing and make wide strides. Or just do what you want to do. All visual art tech­niques are flex­ible and adapt­able for cre­ativ­ity, how­ever, while work­ing on a big pro­ject don’t for­get employ­ing the left brain as well, so the car we talked about earlier would move for­ward. Therefore, its good that the brain is a single unit. If regard­less the efforts, some­thing does not func­tion — rely on a team work — it always works.

THINK BIG.

If inter­ested, fol­low these links:

BusinessWeek‘s best young entrepreneur‘s blog here.

Start up con­fer­ence here.

About author:

Simona Racaite
Simona Račaitė is a periodic writer of Art Pit. The main focus of her interests covers all forms of movement, art technologies, creativity and other innovative approaches. At the moment, her main involvement lays under the huge organizational structures and their operating functions. After chewing roots of practical design perception in Vilniu... Read further >