Creativity: The key to a Scalable and Repeatable Art/Business
Posted by Mark Hedengren on
Recently I read Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull the founder/CEO of Pixar. Catmull is from Salt Lake City got all of his degrees including a PhD at the University of Utah. In fact graduates U of U Computer Science program in the 70s are responsible for Atari, Silicon Graphics, Pixar, and Adobe. You add to that BYU’s Novell and WordPerfect shows what a tremendous influence Utah had and is having on technology.
In business you want to create a company that is scalable and repeatable business model. Meaning you want to create a business that can grow and repeatable perform it marketable action. For example Novell was a scalable repeatable business model because they could make many copies of their software and repeatable because customers would want their software serviced and upgraded.
In the arts scalable and repeatable is almost 100% to do with creativity. That it is why it is so crucial. You can have all the funding in the world and if you can’t come up with a lot of good creative ideas then you are dead in the water. I saw this while I was in graduate school where I was surrounded by students who received $10,000 a month checks from their parents and wore designer clothing but still had the most difficulty time make paintings pieces of art in a year.
Conversely I saw students who would give up their rent money to fund their art produce a steady stream of work.
The reason Pixar was able to scale was because it had many creative ideas beyond Toy Story. If they had been less creative their growth would have looked more like Dream Works Animation.
Since creativity is at the core of our business I’m going to spend my next two emails discussing my thoughts how to develop and protect creativity in yourself and in others.
Link to Creativity Inc.
http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429632159&sr=8-1&keywords=creativity+inc
In business you want to create a company that is scalable and repeatable business model. Meaning you want to create a business that can grow and repeatable perform it marketable action. For example Novell was a scalable repeatable business model because they could make many copies of their software and repeatable because customers would want their software serviced and upgraded.
In the arts scalable and repeatable is almost 100% to do with creativity. That it is why it is so crucial. You can have all the funding in the world and if you can’t come up with a lot of good creative ideas then you are dead in the water. I saw this while I was in graduate school where I was surrounded by students who received $10,000 a month checks from their parents and wore designer clothing but still had the most difficulty time make paintings pieces of art in a year.
Conversely I saw students who would give up their rent money to fund their art produce a steady stream of work.
The reason Pixar was able to scale was because it had many creative ideas beyond Toy Story. If they had been less creative their growth would have looked more like Dream Works Animation.
Since creativity is at the core of our business I’m going to spend my next two emails discussing my thoughts how to develop and protect creativity in yourself and in others.
Link to Creativity Inc.
http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429632159&sr=8-1&keywords=creativity+inc