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TCE stands for The Creative Economy, a great book by John Hawkins. Inspired by his ‘10 rules for success in the creative economy’ I explore how this affects my daily life and work.

Put the priority on ideas, not on data
Create and grow your own creative imagination. Build a personal balance sheet of intellectual capital. Understand patents, copyright, trademarks and other intellectual property laws. Entrepreneurs are more worried to lose their ability to think than if their company loses money.

I believe the quote contains a contradiction. As an entrepreneur I surely value the ability to think above earning every penny I can get. When you make sure you keep the thinking process on the go, you’ll be able to make money with your intellectual property quite easily. The contradiction lies within companies being worried to lose money. Here’s why.

I love to share my ideas and knowledge. With everyone interested but also with companies in the same industry or maybe even direct competition. This is related to an active thinking process. If done right, you’re always ahead of the competition or at least be able to use you thinking power to change your idea, concept or strategy.

People asked me if I’m not scared people ’steal’ an idea. I’ve always told that idea’s can’t be stolen because they’re just a bunch of thoughts. I focus on the difference between ideas and concepts. Developing an idea to a strong and valuable concept takes time, thinking power and skill. Now the concept has a small market worth, but more important  Depending on the level of completion of the concept you need to be careful about what to tell and what not to tell.

When a competitor copies and launches on of your concepts, is your company losing money? I think not. I even think it’s good when it happens. When competition sees the same opportunity as you, this is evidence there is a market for your product. Besides that you can watch what they’re doing and learn from it. Use that information in your thinking process and it will enable you to take more balanced decisions.

Be open on abstract levels and get people to think with you. Do this face to face, or if you like on big scale via blogs and twitter. This opens the freeway of collective creative intelligence.

Here are some of my tips regarding this TCE rule.

1. Train your thinking power
   Read blogs, articles and books related to stuff your working on. Keeps you sharp. But also talk with other people about their ideas. Not only do most of them like to hear your feedback, it trains your thinking power because you get better at it and learn from them.
2. Don’t overprotect your ideas
   It is very important to protect your ideas, but over protection makes it harder to apply changes when needed.
3. Be open
   Closely related to my first tip. When working on your own ideas, share your thoughts with others. They maybe working in your industry, but maybe even more important in a different industrie. Learn from their thinking process when pitching your idea. Best example is related to on of the ideas we’re working within Firmhouse, Dealkeeper. At a conference I talked about it and somebody pointed me directly to a competitor still quite under the radar. I probably wouldn’t found that competitor myself.

TCE stands for The Creative Economy, a great book by John Hawkins. Inspired by his ‘10 rules for success in the creative economy’ I explore how this affects my daily life and work.

Invent yourself
Create a unique cluster of personal talents. Own your image. Manage it. Build momentum. Leave school early, if you want, but never stop learning. Break the rules. Be clear about your own assets and talents. They are unique. And they are all you have.

I consider myself a full time entrepreneur, working hard on starting my company and inventing myself. I’m also a student, working hard to get my bachelor in ‘Communication and Multimedia Design’. This means I’m in a continuous mode of self-exploration.

Luckily, there aren’t big contradictions in the combination of my study and company, which creates room to explore knowledge outside my company and study.

But who or what am I?

I’m a generalist. I know a little about a lot of subjects. Maybe you can call me a ‘Creative Generalist’. I love to explore information and trends, but I won’t digg in too far. Some people think being a generalist has a lot of downsides, but I believe it’s a great thing. However last year I really didn’t think about it this way.

Last year there were two ‘changing’ moments. Merging Firmhouse with Michiel’s company and switching my major study.

Within Firmhouse I’m responsible of planning projects and testing our ideas so we can launch them as new products and services. This creative process involves a lot of thinking and quick analysis. When concepting is done with ‘too much’ knowledge, it becomes a burden that keeps you from ‘freewheeling’.

My first major study was focused on business intelligence and informatics, a study teaching you to become a specialist in analyzing business processes and translating these experiences to system designs and blueprints. I didn’t like it because of the contents of the study, but more important I couldn’t focus on something I was already capable of doing on a basic level. I switched to a more creative study: Communication and Multimedia Design. It’s closer related to my tasks within Firmhouse and it focuses on trends.

These moments are important because it teached me more about being a generalist. I was told by experienced people that I needed to find my specialization in order to become a better at what I’m doing. I needed to find that ‘inner spark’ so I could develop better skills and add more value to the projects I worked on. After a lot of thinking about this, I can say I’m becoming a specialist in being a generalist… If I look at how fast I can go from idea to concept compared to one year ago, I’ve made tremendous progress.

What do I do to invent myself?

I try to be as diverse as possible. It enables me to put things in perspective and allows me to do a good job at Firmhouse. I read a diversity of books and blogs. The people I know are diverse, which allows me to learn from their experiences and knowledge. I use my blog and Twitter to re-share my experiences and knowledge so other people can learn from me.

Yesterday I attended to 8UO (8 uur overwerken) which basically is a gathering of creative people that pull an eight hour overtime to help charities with problems like their advertising campaigns. Throughout the country 45 teams spread over 9 cities worked on a variety of assignments.

Most of the assignments involved communication problems, to be more specific most the charities asked a creative approach to generate more money for their cause.

StopTBC!
I was assigned to the KNCV Tuberculosefonds which recently launched a new campaign to get more attention for the problems of TBC in developing countries. It’s called StopTBC! and will be all over the place in the coming weeks. They asked us to think of ways how they can generate a steady and growing income for cause.

So we did. The first session resulted in three idea’s. These contained two important aspects, awareness and the simple actions people can take to donate and let others donate. In the second part of the evening the ideas where translated to one concept.

We presented the concept twice, in Dutch. Below you find the pitches I’ve recorded with my Zi6, sorry for the bad quality . The room was quite dark.. Enjoy!

8UO TBC – Presentatie eerste ideeën from Bob on Vimeo.

8UO TBC – Eindpresentatie from Bob on Vimeo.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts on this, I love to hear you.

One of the best innovations on the web in last few years is the Creative Commons licensing model. It allows designers, graphical artists, copywriters and other kinds of people working with copyrighted material to share and reproduce work more easily.

However Creative Commons is aimed to create freedom that creative people want to give to their work. The website of Creative Commons states that it also aims for scientists. I think this licensing model isn’t suitable for sharing research information. Therefore more specific tools are needed.

This short video is an introduction to Science Commons. Where Creative Commons focuses on sharing, Science Commons is meant to define a standard and licensing model that allows different resources to integrate their data.

By data we mean petabytes of research data that isn’t used to it’s full potential. It’s stuck in silo’s and only can be used by the few people that have access to it.

I think it’s great finally a workgroup is focusing on the research field. If they somehow are able to create the same effects as the Creative Commons did, this could have a big impact on the research field and how it operates.

A few days ago I read about Friendster being awarded it’s fourth patent in Social Networking. In 2006 they already received a patent that refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”. Now they received a patent that refers to “compatibility scoring of users in a social network“.

In short terms, they currently own the intellectual property that are the basics to online social networking. A big part of these basics are being used by Facebook, MySpace, Hyves and other social networks. Now it belongs to Friendster, one of the first social networks. This concerns me.

My biggest concern is a ‘war’ with lawyers that could rise in the Valley. The biggest ’start-ups’ over there are based on the basic principles of Social Networking as we know them today. Or at least the basics described in the patents.

Will Friendster become a pool of Intellectual Property that will charge other social networks for using ‘their’ methods and techniques? My guess is that we might see signs of this sooner than we might expect.

Friendster being awarded this patent feels awckward. They might be one of the first social networks that implemented the features described in the patents. When they released them to the public domain they didn’t took the effort to protect it. However one of the most important rules to successfully apply for a patent states that the contents of the patents may not already exist in the public domain.

Patents are meant to stimulate inventors to keep inventing and make money of their inventions by protecting the work that they created. Now it’s becoming a tool for business to give a boost to their cashflow and control competition. That isn’t particalairy bad but the side effect could be slowing down innovations in the market.

I’m curious how these patents are going to effect a fast moving market like the internet.