I think Chris Rock is the funniest dude on the planet, period.  There’s a lot of things that I don’t find funny like #77 on Stuff White People Like – Musical Comedies.  Every now and then, I’ll pop in Bigger and Blacker, and I’ll be ROFL.  Seriously.  Laughing so hard I almost pull a muscle in my stomach.

“There are only three things women need in life: food, water, and compliments.”

Harvard Business Review just published an article titled “Innovate Like Chris Rock” which goes over the process and tactics of Chris Rock in becoming the most popular comedian in the world.

There is no doubt he’s got enormous talent, but his brilliance also comes from the fact that he’s an experimental innovator. The jokes he rolls out on his global tours are actually the output of thousands of small experiments – some of which worked, but many of which did not.

First, he picks small venues where he can do rapid, low-risk experiments with new material. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small venue called the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. Rock told the Orange Country Register, “It’s like boxing training camp. I always pick a comedy club to work out in.”

In front of audiences of say 30 to 40 people, Rock will bring a yellow legal note pad with lots of joke ideas scribbled on it, according to fellow comedian Matt Ruby. In sets that run say 45 minutes, many of the jokes will fall flat, but according to Ruby, “There were 5-10 lines during the night that were just ridiculously good. Like lightning bolts. My sense is that he starts with these bolts and then writes around them.”

It’s all part of a process. When the material falls flat, Rock will even pause to say things like, “This needs to be fleshed out more if it’s gonna make it.”

Experimental innovators don’t overanalyze or put all of their hopes into one big bet – they quickly, creatively, and inexpensively use experiments to learn, gather insights, and identify unique opportunities – they then rapidly iterate, relearn, and refine to achieve success.

What’s your boxing training camp?  How do you test your ideas?  How do you know what will work?  When entrepreneurs generate ideas, I think it’s extremely important to test your ideas and get feedback on them as well.  Here’s some ideas on how to screen through your ideas.

1. Create a list. Capture all of your ideas and write a one-sentence blurb about them.
2. Share your ideas. Show the list to your friends, advisors, mentors, etc.  Publish the list on your blog.
3. Resonate. Ask your friends to pick their favorite ones and flush out the ideas that resonate.
4. Repeat. Take the short list back to your friends and ask them to poke holes in your idea.
5. Execute. Take action on the ones that make it through the ringer.  Throw the rest out or add them to your backburner.

Anyone going to the Pop!Tech Conference this year?

If you’re interested in going, check out the Pop!Tech Contest on the Behance Network.  First prize gets a complimentary ticket!

The world is a place of increasingly dramatic scarcities and abundances: more people, creating more wealth, has left us with fewer natural resources and fewer undisturbed wild places. The same dynamic is playing itself out in economics, politics, culture and elsewhere. But it isn’t all bad: more people, connected in more ways, means more ideas, creativity and solutions. Sometimes scarcity and abundance can be good and bad. Pop!Tech, a path-breaking non-profit working at the vanguard of thought leadership and social innovation, and Behance have partnered to find out what scarcity and abundance mean to the world’s leading creative professionals.

We’re eager to see your creative interpretations of the theme scarcity and abundance in: ecology, culture, politics, design, religion, technology, or simply your own creative imagination. The individual who visualizes this world of More and More and Less and Less — in the most compelling fashion — will be invited to participate in and be featured at one of the world’s premier thought leadership conferences: Pop!Tech.

Each year Pop!Tech gathers 600 thought leaders, influencers and social change agents – from the arts, science, technology, business, social innovation and more – to explore the new ideas, technologies and forces of change shaping our future, at the renowned Pop!Tech Conference. The event is held in a restored 19th century opera house, at the height of the Autumnal foliage season (October 22 – 25, 2008), in beautiful seaside Camden, ME.

Here’s my list of conferences I would like to attend (ordered by date):

TED Conference
February 27 – March 1, 2008
Monterey, California
$6,000 but invite-only
1000 attendees

“An annual conference in Monterey devoted to Technology, Entertainment and Design. Brings together 1000 of the world’s most remarkable people. The format is fast-paced, with 50+ speakers over four days (plus short talks, performances and evening events). In 2005, an additional conference, TEDGlobal, was inaugurated. It’s held every other year, in a different location, focusing on a different theme.”

PSFK Conference
March 27, 2008
New York, NY

GEL
April 24 – 28, 2008
New York, NY
$1,200
400 attendees

“Gel (“Good Experience Live”) is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life.”

D Conference
May 27 – 29, 2008
Carlsbad, California
$4,495

“Since its debut in 2003, The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way.

Conference creators and executive producers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher put the industry’s top players to the test during informal but pointed conversations about the impact digital technology will have on our lives now and in the future. The results are critical insights and relevant advice that stay with you well after the conference ends.”

Sustainable Brands Conference
June 2-5, 2008
Monterey, California
$2,295

“The global move toward innovation for sustainability is alive and well, and leading companies big and small are capitalizing on this new opportunity to build sales and brand equity.  How can you join their ranks? Come find out at Sustainable Brands ’08—your number one, highest value opportunity to learn how to translate a commitment to sustainability into revenue growth, improved customer and employee retention, and new brand value.”

ideaCity
June 18 – 20, 2008
Toronto, Canada
$2,750 – $3,500+

“ideaCity, also known as ‘Canada’s Premiere Meeting of the Minds’, is an eclectic gathering of artists, adventurers, authors, cosmologists, doctors, designers, entertainers, filmmakers, inventors, magicians, musicians, scientists and technologists.

Fifty of the planet’s brightest minds converge on Toronto each June to speak to a highly engaged audience. Only 497 are privileged to attend.”

Cusp Conference
Chicago
September 10-11, 2008
$1,750

Interesting New York
New York City
September 13, 2009
$35

Picnic
September 24 – 26, 2008
Amsterdam

“PICNIC brings together and disseminates the ideas and knowledge of the world’s best creators and innovators, through a top-class conference, a broad selection of seminars, a series of hands-on workshops and many many other events.”

Idea Festival
September 25 – 27, 2008
Louisville, Kentucky

“Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading and highly diverse thinkers from across the nation and around the globe to explore and celebrate innovation, imagination and cutting-edge ideas.

The IdeaFestival is a unique non-linear program designed to stretch people’s horizon’s and promote breakthrough thinking… utilizing multiple venues to showcase, discuss and “connect” important ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc.”

The Feast: Creativity for Good
New York City
October 16
$395

“On October 16th in New York City, alldaybuffet and our closest friends are coming to dinner. “The Feast” will gather 150 of the world’s leading creative mavericks, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, and innovators together to inspire action to change the world.

Our mothers always told us “there’s good in everything” so we’ve curated a series of inspiring, mind-expanding, and innovative talks that will showcase a look at social innovation from all angles. From design to business to science, and everything between, our speakers will share insights on the power of creativity to propel social change within and across industries.

Anchored in innovative ideas with a focus on action, The Feast will take a cross-disciplinary look at executions, strategies and concepts – digital answers to global problems, social design solutions and successful triple-bottom line business models. And more than just watching, The Feast will connect this remarkable network through “matchmaking” networking breaks, group projects, and one legendary after-party! Our hope is to leave you high on possibilities with a new menu of connections to get it all done.”

Business Innovation Factory
October 15-16, 2008
Providence, Rhode Island

“More conversation than conference, BIF-4 will bring together many oftoday’s most compelling innovators, business model renegades and truetransformers to reveal the secrets of innovation success throughpersonal storytelling.”

Pop!Tech
October 22-25, 2008
Camden, Maine
$3,500
600 attendees

“For the twelfth year, the Pop!Tech Conference will again convene a network of 600 remarkable thinkers, doers, leaders and global change agents in science, technology, social innovation, business, environmentalism, globalization, media, education, and many other fields for a four-day exploration of ideas shaping the future.”

Opportunity Green
November 8-9
Los Angeles, California

“Opportunity Green is a convergence of the prime movers & shakers and the up & coming innovators driving today’s green economy.”

EG ’08 Conference
December 11-13 2008
Monterey, California
$4,000

“This is the conference for the most influential and creative minds in the world.”

Check out the first Behance article I wrote with Scott Belsky (founder of Behance). After sitting in brainstorming sessions for the past couple of years that led to nowhere, we developed some keen insights that should help you “think inside a new box.”

“Whenever we generate ideas, we’re always told to ‘think outside the box.’ We’ve been trained to play the ‘numbers’ game in the creative process, to populate the wall with as many ideas as possible until one sticks. This process, if done incorrectly, can yield frustrating meetings that run in circles. Sometimes these wayward brainstorms can cast you far from a viable solution. Over the past couple of years, our team has come to recognize some necessary constraints that help generate new and fresh ideas.”

And if you really like the article, digg it or click the appreciate button at the bottom. Thanks!

Seth sent me a great article from Mavericks at Work about unleashing freedom to achieve success. The old version way of doing things was to “work hard (for a very long time), achieve success, earn freedom (to retire and do all things you missed out on while you were working)” and the new version is to “find work that afford you freedom and success.”

“Freedom is a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control; freedom is about what you can unleash. And, increasingly, freedom isn’t something you pay your dues to earn so much as a basic human right of all working adults.”

One of my favorite examples from the article was about Best Buy’s ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) initiative. The basic principle is that people can do whatever and whenever they want as long as they get their work done. From there, they created “13 commandments” that guide ROWE. Some of the commandments: every meeting is optional, nobody talks about how many hours they’ve worked, and there is no judgement about how you spend your time.

I started to look into ROWE and came across some other interesting things and tidbits. Here’s a great NY Times article about productivity and how the “put a lot of hours in, get a lot of output” model was based on the industrial age when output was directly tied to the input (more importantly, the time). Today, we’re moving into the conceptual age where creativity and innovation trump conventions and traditional thinking. The days of working 9-5 will be non-existent.

Here’s another article from Business Week that dives into the Best Buy ROWE program. And here are the sites from the two visionaries that started the ROWE movement. CultureRx is the consultancy of Cali & Jody. And check out their blog while you’re at it too.

So what does everyone think out there?  Can’t we all strive to have a four-hour workweek?

Idealab

Idealab itself employs about 70 people who provide support to the start-up companies. Employees of Idealab are compensated by Idealab, hold Idealab stock options, and receive Idealab benefits. Idealab operating companies are companies that are developed from ideas created by Idealab. They are legally separate entities managed by independent teams of executives who report to their respective boards of directors. Employees of Idealab operating companies are compensated by the operating company itself (not by Idealab), and typically hold stock options in the particular company, and receive that company’s benefits.

In addition to capital, Idealab provides a full range of resources to infuse start-ups with the support they need to rapidly introduce innovative products and services. Resources include office space and the accompanying office services, development and technology, graphic design, marketing, competitive research, legal, accounting and business development support and services. In addition, Idealab provides advice on strategy, branding and corporate structure.

?WhatIf!

We work with clients who genuinely wantto innovate and grow. We help them release the creative potential of their people, products and brands.We do this by working for a fee or as joint venture partners on innovation projects.We also work with clients to increase their innovation capability – developing skills, organisational structures and mechanisms, and identifying and developing how to leadfor successful innovation.We are an action-orientated, happy and hard working team of over 300 people with offices in the UK, USA, China and Australia.We work in over 40 countries worldwide across a wide range of clients and market sectors.

Acne

Acne is broken into a couple different companies. Some of them include Acne Creative, Acne Digital, Acne Film, Acne Jeans, Acne Jr and Acne Paper.

Influx has a great write-up on them as well.

“It becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.”To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”

This is another argument of why we need to collaborate. With technology the way it is and the increasing demand of innovation, we can’t focus on creating breakthrough ideas within the confines of our own company. In fact, we don’t even have to rely on people with x amount of years within our industry. Some would argue that you can still get innovative ideas from people that know absolutely nothing about your brand, product or customers.

One way to incorporate this into your own company is to compile a network of outside thinkers that you can call upon whenever you need to do an innovation session or workshop.

“In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own start-up businesses, said Trudy Steinfeld, the executive director of the Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University.

“There’s a sexiness to starting something cool,” she said. “Now we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use all over the world.”

With books such as A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink where he states that “the future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities-inventiveness, empathy, meaning-predominate.” No longer will analytical jobs such as accountants be respected or valued but the creative, innovative, entrepreneurial jobs will be respected. It’s because we’re moving into the conceptual age. And now it looks like the law and medicine professions or moving down a notch as well.

So what does that mean?

We’re about to see an explosion of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. I think we’re on the brink of an Innovation Movement that will change the business culture.

One of my favorite brands, Behance, just conducted a great interview with Jason Wachob of Crummy Brothers.

“If you come up with a great product and everything else will take care of itself. People will find it and you. With both Crummy Brothers and MindBodyGreen, the focus was 100% on the product — not projections, not business plan writing, not hiring a PR team, etc. Projections, revenues, distribution, press can all be worked out, but a great product can’t be. Once we nailed our product with Crummy Brothers, sure enough we landed a coveted national deal with Whole Foods.

Creativity has no bounds. Suppliers can be sourced, numbers can be crunched, and capital can be raised — but it all starts with innovation. Work your ass off and focus on what you do best (as mentioned above, too many focus on what they lack, in terms of themselves and in terms of resources) and let the rest take care of itself.”

Everything revolves around innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. By creating something that offers utility and adds value to the world, people have no choice but to come seek you out. If you are out there recreating the wheel, then you will have spend money on advertising to communicate that your brand is better than that brand. Why? Because you are essentially selling the same thing as them. There’s nothing else to differentiate your brand so you have to communicate that you’re different. Obviously not the right model.