Its been awhile since we’ve checked into online startup community and contest organizer Ideablob.com. Turns out that campus entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the “idea” space provided by Advanta Corp at Ideablob.com.

Two Penn State students have won awards for their ideas — they were separate entrants in different months. Check out Aaron Fleishman and his developing world health care social venture idea and Matt Allison’s personal training software.

We have also learned about Ideablob Blob live events on campuses such as Belmont U and University of Pennsylvania. These are live action versions of Ideablob where people come up with innovative ideas on site and discuss. Sounds cool.

Photo courtesy SXC.

Two very different types of contests and a look at the Polaroid-A-Day project of Jamie Livingston, plus the results of an art-collectors survey and “artist date” ideas, are the catches-of-the-day from the teaming expanse of the creative blog-o-sphere!

1. Stretch your idea fluency muscles! The Heart of Innovation blog, which is run by Innovation Champions, is having the First Annual Multiple Uses of Ping Pong Ball Contest!

There’s no deadline posted on the site, but Idea Champions, which describes itself as “a consulting and training company dedicated to awakening and nurturing the spirit of innovation,” is offering goodies to the winners that include the company’s Free the Genie cards and the book “Awake at the Wheel,” written by Mitch Ditkoff, co-founder and president of Idea Champions. Even if you don’t enter, the photo accompanying the post announcing the contest is priceless.

2. For an entirely different sort of contest experience, there is a cautionary post from the Artist, Emerging blog about predatory contests put on by hotels and others seeking to decorate their rooms with art.

Deanna, who writes the blog, posts large parts of the competition prospectus and explains her concerns.

“I can understand that a young artist just starting out might jump at the chance to have his or her artwork featured in a hip loft hotel. And if it were just a contest where they chose some paintings, hung them in their hotel, and gave the artists a cash award, then that would be fine.
“And if they wanted to create reproductions of your work and gave you a percentage of sales, then that might be OK.

“But. They want artists to sign over their copyright. If I interpret this correctly, if I won, I would get $2,250 and they would get my painting, all rights to do whatever they want to with it…Think about it. After you get your $2,250, your artwork is theirs. They could make your painting their logo and you wouldn’t get anything. They could create a line of linens featuring your artwork and sell it at Macy’s for $500 a pop and you wouldn’t get anything. Or worse…”

I appreciate bloggers who bring up copyright issues, because it is so easy in the heat of selling/pitching/deal-making to forget to fight for the future potential of our work. Copyright is, at its best, a way of saying “thank you” to the originator of the work, no matter how many times we’ve seen a derivative work.

(Speaking of which, have you noticed that anytime a feature film uses the tune “Happy Birthday,” there’s a line about it in the credits? That’s a copyright for you.)

3. Finally, a couple of interesting links chronicling the legacy of Jamie Livingston, whose Polaroid-A-Day project continued from a college assignment in March 1979 until his untimely death from cancer at the age of 41 in October 1997. He used a Polaroid SX-70 camera and the photos—more than 6,000 in all—chronicle his life and times, even his decline in health and death.

After Livingston’s death, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put together a public exhibit and website using the photos and called it PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence. The physical exhibit opened in 2007 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College (where Livingston started the series, as a student, way back when). The exhibit included rephotographs of every Polaroid and took up a 7 x 120 foot space.

Besides being an amazing daily practice for Livingston, the collection as a whole seems to really resonate with those of us who see the significance of the story arcs of a person’s life. A commenter on a post about the website/exhibit written by Chris Higgins of Mental Floss said it best:

“Stuff like this is significant. People NEED to be remembered. Especially when they do something so spectacular as this even with such a sad ending. He continued his passion right to the last day of his life. That deserves some kind of history.”‘

(And a hearty tip o’ the blog to Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn for helping me discover this amazing story.)

BONUS!
Two more great links.

Making a Mark: Final results of a survey on whether artists collect art
Artist Date ideas from The Artist’s Way blog: Great ideas for wooing your creative self

We devote a lot of brainpower at futurethink to devising new ways to teach and practice innovation. Two things we speak about frequently with organizations are: 1) the power of harnessing a diverse set of eclectic minds, rather than just expert minds to more quickly solve a problem or better generate ideas, and 2) the importance of looking at things from a different perspective.

That’s why I was so glad to read abut the recent Stanford University Innovation contest.

Each year, Stanford’s Technology Ventures group selects an everyday object (this year:

a ball of rubber bands) that entrants must ‘add value to.’ Essentially, entrants must take something ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary.

What I find fascinating about the contest isn’t the amount of ideas that result, but the sheer diversity of them.

Participants’ ideas this year ranged from the typical: bracelets that can raise money for a cause (a la LiveStrong); to the topical: branded bands that promote locally grown/organic produce; to the completely different: a rubber band model of the universe to be used for educational purposes.

What can this contest teach organizations? First, the contest shows the sheer power of combining diverse perspectives. If a group of people can come up with so many different ways to use a ball of rubber bands, think what a diverse group can do when the same constraint-free thinking is applied to your current products or services. Getting an eclectic group of employees involved in innovation is critical to innovation’s success. That’s why leading innovators involve employees at every level and department to attack innovation challenges. The power of perspective wins every time.

Second, the contest reminds us to keep asking question, like: “What else?” We are always in search of creating the next iPod, but we constantly forget that we can innovate by simply leveraging the things we already have and thinking about them in new ways. We spend so much time accepting what we are given, rather than asking the fundamental questions that make innovation happen: I call these fundamental questions: “What if?, “How else?”, “Where else?”, “When else”, “Who else?”, “What else?” and most importantly, “Why not?”

For years we’ve used a similar exercise in our innovation skills workshops called “Re:Think”. We give teams of people everyday objects (scissors, paper clips, Post-it Notes) and tell them this: “Your R&D department has just created this (point to the object you’ve selected for them) new groundbreaking invention. They don’t know what it really is or does – but they know that it has tremendous potential. Your job as a business person is to name the invention, decide what it does, and tell us how it creates value for the audience it serves.” I never knew there were so many new ways to use paperclips, for example (my favorite: package 100 of them a children’s game called “ThinkLinks”, where players have to link colored paperclips in new ways to create patterns and designs.)

So, here’s my challenge to you: try to Re:Think something today. Take the first everyday object you can find. Pretend you’ve never heard of it or seen it before. Spend a few minutes looking at it closely. Now, come up with 10 ideas for how to use it differently.

Can you do it?

At our next Monday morning status meeting here at futurethink, I’m going to challenge my team to Re:Think homework. My son will be rooting for a breakthrough solution, I’m sure.