GOOD Magazine

In a survey conducted by IBM last year, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one competitive edge” of the future. And Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently wrote that dance, music, theater, and visual arts “are essential to preparing our nation’s young people for a global economy fueled by innovation and creativity.”

Yet despite the need for employees and entrepreneurs with well-developed right-brain “soft skills” and the wealth of research indicating that students at schools with robust arts programs are more likely to go to college, school art programs nationwide are being decimated by budget cuts. In Los Angeles, elementary school art programs may soon disappear altogether. The result is that students are missing out on the opportunity to, in Duncan’s words, “experience the arts in deep and meaningful ways and to make curricular connections with math, science, and the humanities.”

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Springwise.com

Share Some Sugar enables consumers to lend and borrow rarely used items with their neighbors while earning some extra cash.

We’ve seen an increasing number of sharing platforms appear over the years, as consumers seek to lend and borrow rarely used items while earning and saving some extra cash. NeighborGoods and StuffPal are two efforts we’ve seen designed to facilitate such exchanges, and recently we came across another: Share Some Sugar.

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Kauffman Foundation

New study is first to identify characteristics of firms started by entrepreneurs who create products for their own use, then commercialize them

A study released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation shows that “user entrepreneurs” have founded more than 46 percent of innovative startups that have lasted five years or more, even though this group creates only 10.7 percent of U.S. startups overall.

“Who Are User Entrepreneurs?” is the first study to quantify the prevalence and characteristics of user entrepreneurs – those who have created innovative products or services for their own use, then subsequently founded firms to commercialize them – and identify how the firms they start compare to other U.S. startups in terms of revenue growth, job creation, R&D investment and intellectual property.

“Users have ignited technological change in industries ranging from medical devices to sports equipment to juvenile products. In many cases, users, not producers, have the best information, and their incentive is to build something better for their own use. As a result, they are able to create truly novel innovations. When they commercialize these innovations, we all benefit,” said Sonali Shah, assistant professor and Buerk Fellow at Foster School of Business, University of Washington, and co-author of the report. “This report provides the first comprehensive documentation of the prevalence of user entrepreneurship. Users make significant innovative and economic contributions to society – contributions that we are just beginning to understand and acknowledge.”

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New York Times

For most city officials here, making plans to evacuate tens of thousands of residents from the wrath of a hurricane brings to mind a tangle of logistics: bus routes, out-of-state shelters, fresh water supplies, public safety. But for one young transplant named Robert X. Fogarty, evacuation means 12-foot-tall sculptures placed strategically around town.

Mr. Fogarty, 28, a Nebraska native who came to New Orleans five years ago as an AmeriCorps volunteer, is still volunteering, as the head of the nonprofit Evacuteer.org, an organization that recruits, trains and manages an army of about 350 volunteers every year to evacuate the city in case of a hurricane.

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GOOD Magazine

The rise of the locavore movement introduced millions of people to the 100-mile diet, which involves eating only food produced within one’s own region. Now, a new focus on sustainable architecture is applying the same concept to homes.

The idea of a 100-mile house shouldn’t be shocking: Historically, most homes were made using local materials simply because it was more practical. But in an age when even middle-class homeowners can order marble countertops from Italy and bamboo floors from China, creating a home entirely from local materials challenges builders to carefully consider every piece of the structure, from the foundation to the eaves.

Last week, the Architecture Foundation of British Columbia launched an international competition to design a 1,200-square-foot, four-person home that exclusively uses materials made or recycled within 100 miles of Vancouver. David M. Hewitt, the current chair of the Architecture Foundation, came up with the idea for the competition on a whim and presented it at a board meeting. “It was almost thrown out facetiously, and everybody latched onto it,” he says.

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Fast Company, Co.Create

Would it shock you if I told you that we’re ignoring our greatest creative resource every single day–even stifling it? What would you think if I told you that creative resource had nothing to do with what you do every day of your life?

For the sake of this article, let’s define creativity as the ability to solve problems in an unexpected or surprising way. Many of us may be in careers that are perceived as “creative”: designers, developers, writers, or entrepreneurs. But we don’t force ourselves regularly to solve problems that are clearly out of our areas of expertise. That’s where we’re squandering our greatest creative resource. With routine, people tend to get stuck in patterned forms of thought. By forcing our minds out of our comfort zones, we can become a part of a more intellectually diverse crowd that helps us continue to learn and challenge our own assumptions.

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Springwise.com

HighScore House is encouraging families to set their own household challenges and rewards to make chores fun.

The gamification trend has already hit many aspects of offline life – mobile app Leap is one recent example from the US, allowing groups of friends to set themselves real-world challenges to win rewards. Now HighScore House has adapted it for the home, hoping to incentivise household tasks.

The philosophy behind the website is that too many children have been brought up to enjoy playing in the virtual universes of computer games instead of reaping the benefits of real-world activities with meaningful outcomes.

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Springwise.com

MindSumo is a new platform on which businesses can invite students to solve problems, while those students are given the opportunity to show off their ideas to potential employers.

Regular readers of Springwise will already be well aware of how crowdsourcing can be used by businesses and organizations to solve challenging problems, and $300 House would be one recent example of this. Now we’ve come across MindSumo, a new platform which hopes to be as beneficial to those contributing solutions as it is for the companies hosting challenges.

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Fast Company Co.Exist

America is changing how it works. As more people start their own entrepreneurial businesses out of their bedrooms, is it time to rethink how we divide work and living? This new home design makes space for both.

If entrepreneurship and artisanry are the future of work in America, perhaps this is the future of housing.

Designed by Clemson University architecture students Eric Laine and Suzanne Steelman, this housing concept, called LiveWork, takes sustainability beyond solar panels. “Being ‘green’ is very en vogue,” Laine says, “but people primarily focus on the environmental aspect of being sustainable. We wanted to expand on that notion.”

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GOOD Design

Around the world, only a few hundred people make a living as fulltime typeface designers. Two of them happen to live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, population 167,000, where they’ve embarked on an ambitious project to distill the city’s artistic and entrepreneurial spirit into a font called Chatype. The goal is to help the city and its businesses forge a distinct and cohesive identity through custom typeface, sending a visual message to the world that Chattanooga—a rapidly growing city in the midst of a creative renaissance—is “more than just your average Southern town.”

Chatype came about when D.J. Trischler, a brand consultant, discovered he’d been sitting next to typeface designer Jeremy Dooley at their local coffee shop. The two became fixated on a question: What if Chattanooga had its own typeface? The idea may sound strange from an American perspective, but it’s actually the norm throughout Europe, where even small cities employ unique typefaces to distinguish themselves. In the United States, the only similar attempt was a failed one by academics in the Twin Cities, according to the Chatype team. Yet Trischler and Dooley say this is the first-ever attempt to create custom typeface at the grassroots level, rather than from the demand of a city government.

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