Study: People Are Biased Against Creative Thinking 377
An anonymous reader writes "Despite how much people might say they like creative thinking, they don't, at least according to studies. 'We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,' says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity. 'As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,' he says."
Re:BZZZZT! Article Suspect! (Score:5, Informative)
The mention of Steve Jobs as an "innovator" makes the article suspect. E.G. the author does not know what she is talking about.
It's arguably worse than that: Jobs (and Apple generally) don't really do 'innovative', in the sense that nearly everything they produced had some sort of less-well-refined immediate antecedent elsewhere, or was purchased, or or the like. However, Jobs is quite notable indeed for his willingness to take successful products out and shoot them in order to make room for something new(even when the new thing is still not a safe bet in competition with the older; but cheaper, widely adopted, and widely accepted thing), to tell people who demand backwards-compatible whatever where they can file their futile protests, and other behaviors that, while not innovative in themselves, are more or less required to take an innovation from 'tech demo' to 'product' in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand, of course, his enthusiasm for ruthless focus would likely have been a very poor fit indeed for a 'blue skies' R&D operation(and indeed, stodgy old Microsoft is the company that has one of those, and seems to carefully avoid applying what it comes up with to anything they actually sell...)
If you want to look at 'innovation' in an institutional context, he isn't a good example of it; but characters like him are clearly relevant to how the broader institutional context interacts with 'creative' or 'innovative' people.