March 2010

At first look, it appears that Innovation Intermediaries, with their access to tens of thousands of brilliant experts, would scare consultants.

The fact is that most companies, perhaps 80%, greatly need help in articulating their pain points, their bottlenecks, their innovation needs, their innovation opportunities.

Only an astute few companies go straight to sites like http://www.innovationorderform.com to get access to brilliance.

Consultants will be around for a while.

This week Peter Lloyd looks into the debate of Communal Creativity and explores both sides of the argument. In so doing, he himself quotes famous authors and musician on their perspective of plagiarism, originality, authenticity, or what have you.

Les Paul, the great musician and inventor of the electric guitar, said it best; “to this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.”

Recent prize-winning German novelist, Helene Hegemann, uses sizable chunks of another writer’s original material. Hegemann, in reply to charges of unoriginality, not only admits appropriation, she defends her cutting and pasting. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

Read more Right Brain Workouts by Peter Lloyd.