That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [82]
Creative Campus works this way: Each year forty to forty-five students are paid between $8 and $10 an hour for ten hours of work a week to come up with ideas that fuse and promote the arts and culture in ways that enrich student life and the artistic life of the surrounding community. They put together their own teams to develop project ideas and to collaborate in executing them. For instance, one project, Lazer explained, “involved Creative Campus interns pulling together a multifaceted partnership with the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce, the City of Tuscaloosa, the City of Northport, and Tuscaloosa County—and Robert McNulty’s Partners for Livable Communities—to develop a comprehensive cultural arts and economic development plan for the region.” The campaign was called “Culture Builds.” Another team put together the Druid City Arts Festival—which is held in downtown Tuscaloosa to highlight a range of local artists and bands, and is now in its second year. Yet another team created a program called Unbound Arts to present the artwork of people with disabilities.
Lazer says that “we are a deliberately unstable and organic group by design.” The purpose is to push students into thinking creatively and entrepreneurially about broadening exposure to the arts “in a way that will push every one of our students out of their comfort zone.” Interns not only have to learn about the area’s art and music scene in depth; they have to propose ideas for engaging it and then work through all the bureaucratic issues involved in staging a major event.
“A lot of the completion of a really creative task is boring,” Lazer said, which is why his program aims not only to foster imagination but also to teach execution. “Persistence trumps talent, but it is best to have both,” he says. “The students who want to organize an arts festival learn to work with the mayor and the city regulations that they need to negotiate. They learn that that is a big part of doing anything exciting.” The whole idea is to let students “play” in a structured way and with a purpose.
Besides thinking creatively and collaboratively, Lazer said, “we are teaching the students two things: self-confidence and resiliency, which is what gives you the ability to get through the failures. It takes you at least ten ideas to come up with the good one,” and then persistence squared to get that good one done. “We have one student,” Lazer added, “who is graduating in electrical engineering who just decided to take one year off to work on his band. His mom told us she is not upset by this detour, which is probably what it will prove to be, because of the self-confidence she has seen her son develop in the program. I suspect that in two or three years, when he is working for Apple or Google, his band experience will also serve him well.”
An Idealab
When you ask Bill Gross what it takes to be creative and a starter-upper, he doesn’t say math or liberal arts or collaboration. He says “courage.”
Gross knows start-ups and starter-uppers as well as anyone in America’s high-tech firmament, for the simple reason that his start-up business manufactures start-ups. Gross founded the Idealab in Pasadena, California, in 1996, describing it as an innovation laboratory that supports “groundbreaking companies whose products and services change the way people think, live, and work.” Working out of a big warehouse, Gross hosts and helps to fund half a dozen or more start-ups at a time under one roof. You can walk the halls of his office and find a budding solar