Last week, I found myself in the bizarre position of attending a conference for YouTube creators. Talk about a fish out of water. Even though I didn't "belong" there, it sparked a bunch of fresh connections and insights... which is exactly the point of this post.

To stimulate innovation, ideas and experiments are critical. But how to free up resources necessary to drive new initiatives forward? Start by pruning back some work that’s past its prime. Here’s how.

Taylor Swift illuminates one of the most counterintuitive findings in all the creativity literature: the best way to have a good idea is to allow yourself to have lots of bad ideas. Seth Godin agrees.

Innovation is a numbers game, which is music to my ears since I’m a statistics nerd. One of my favorite counterintuitive statistical truths is Bayes’ Theorem. Study it to beat the entrepreneurial odds.

Volume and velocity are essential to breaking through. How do you increase both? Steve Jobs advocated an unexpected tactic…

Paraphrasing Google X CEO Astro Teller, sparking group innovation can be as simple asking a team to “Gimme five.” Those two words contain a remarkable depth of wisdom.

World-class creators like Jon Acuff literally count their ideas. It’s one of the simplest ways to measure your creative capacity, and whether it’s growing.

What if one reason we aren’t all a little more like Einstein is a simple cognitive bias? What if we could short circuit that bias with practice?

Good news: we can!

I’ve helped nearly a million fledgling innovators come up with new ideas and assess which are worth pursuing. I have yet to see a student make this one mistake…

I have been consistently disappointed at how few stories are widely-told about remarkable women in the history of innovation. Even so, I was shocked to see research on how broad a phenomenon the underrepresentation truly is.

Pianists play the piano. Swimmers do laps. But what about innovators? What do they do? Innovators generate abundant options. Try this.

Our instinct is to retreat inwardly when tasked with the challenge of coming up with ideas. Instead, we should get out. Here’s my favorite way to find ideas.

Linus Pauling succinctly describes the essence of productive creativity: “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” Sounds simple enough. But just how many is “lots”?

When we ask alumni about the most transformative tools they learned under our tutelage, they regularly mention this. Here’s a brief description of one of the most powerful tools we teach.

There’s not nearly enough airspace afforded the opposition that innovation faces inside of established organizations. While folks generally acknowledge that “the organizational antibodies attack” when they try to do something new, yet few are prepared to face resistance to their new ideas.

Lorne Michaels, the most-nominated person in Emmy history, has accomplished something that very entertainers do: sustained creative excellence. His mantra for creative success not only surprises — it also helps.

Whitney Burks is one of the most creative people I know. She boasts prodigious output across a varied stream of responsibilities and interests. Her secret: “obscene, ostentatious deadlines.”

There’s not nearly enough airspace afforded the opposition that innovation faces inside of established organizations. While folks generally acknowledge that “the organizational antibodies attack” when they try to do something new, it seems that few are prepared to face resistance to their new ideas.