Skip to main content

How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, Ed Catmull

A reading which aided my learning greatly during the course of this module was an article written in 2008 by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar. This reading was based on creativity and although written about Pixar, is applicable to all businesses and industries.
Prior to reading this paper, my beliefs were such that the creativity arises from individuals and not from those working in groups. This belief arose from my knowledge on the subject of “groupthink”, where team members make decisions based on consensus rather than selecting the best ideas.
Ed Catmull stresses however, that “creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.” (Catmull, 2008) The author also underlines that it is more important to invest in good people rather than good ideas through explaining that, “creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.” (Catmull, 2008)
This idea is highlighted in the IDEO video where we see individuals from a variety of backgrounds, including Psychology and Biology working together to solve complex problems, in an innovative and creative way. This concept is further emphasised in the Hargadon et al. paper where, the authors suggest that Thomas Edison should be seen as a collective noun as “Edison is in reality a collective noun and means the work of many men”. (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006)
Catmull also underlines it is more important to invest in good people rather than good ideas through explaining that “if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.” (Catmull, 2008)

Pixar encourage their people to ask for help from their colleagues and to seek feedback so as to prevent failures. This is done through “dailies” and the company “creative brain trust”.  Like IDEO, the company accept and encourage failure and have post-mortems to discuss what went well and didn’t go well in each project.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iona Technologies

·        Iona was founded in 1991 by Chris Horn, Sean Baker and Anrai O’Toole ·        The company progressed from a Trinity campus company, releasing Orbix in 1992 and going public in NASDAQ in 1997 ·        Trinity College Distributed Systems Group (DSG) was a small group of academics and engineers conducting research and development into the problem of inter-network computing systems, essentially connecting systems which were developed as independent systems to work and communicate with one another ·        Their research was initially supported by Trinity and then the EU ·        They took a brave leap from academic to the commercial world due to the attractive opportunity of industries like banking and telecommunications embracing networks and internets ·        Iona found that their c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 2 Design thinking - Build the right thing

This week focused around building the thing right as opposed to building the right thing. Great design has always been concerned with the whole experience of interaction. One of the most interesting topics emerging from the class was prompted by a quote from Alan Cooper. It prompted discussion around what do you get when you cross a computer with a camera? A phone? A plane? With a car? A ship? You get a bigger computer.   The products we use on a daily basis are becoming ever more like software. Allen stressed that we need to develop an annoyance and radar for bad design and an appreciation for superior design. He showed us a variety of good and bad design examples and showed examples of how users will highlight the problems in your products or else they will leave marks e.g. a sign telling the user how to interact correctly with a product / service During the lecture, we also watched a video "Inside IDEO" which followed the IDEO design team revolutionizing the ...
Post a Comment
Read more