Category: 99U

Live from the 99u conference

The 2013 99u conference is well under way, and the first day has been nothing short of incredible. We started off the day with interactive studio sessions, heard some insightful speakers, and ended with intimate master classes.

Here are some memorable pictures & tweets from an epic Day 1.

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Behance’s Annual 99U Conference is next week!

We’re only days away from our annual 99U Conference and the Behance office is buzzing with preparations for the big event. Each year, the 99U team brings together a handful of the world’s most productive creative visionaries and researchers to share pragmatic insights on how to push great ideas forward, create incredible art, build businesses, and change the world. Check out this year’s lineup of speakers:

Can’t make it to this year’s conference? Not to worry – we’ll be live tweeting from @99U and recapping the talks on 99U.com, stay tuned!

The Alva Fellowships 2013, Empowering the Next Generation of Inventors

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Are you incubating a remarkable invention? Applications are now open for our second annual Alva Fellowship program, which will provide seed grants to empower the next generation of inventors to take action on their ideas.

Presented with our friends at GE, the Alva Fellowships will select three winners under 30 years of age who have demonstrated remarkable potential to create useful and innovative new products or services that will help the world work better.The Alva Fellows will be identified through an application process in which young creators share their qualifications as idea executors and outline a specific proposal for a new product or service that they want to bring to market.

All Alva Fellowship winners will receive a $13,500 cash grant to be used in the creation of the proposed product, as well as 1 complimentary ticket to the 2013 99U Conference, a $1,500 travel stipend, and access to GE’s  many experts and educational resources around the world.

More info on official rules & applying here. 

 

Behance’s 99U Conference: It’s Not About Ideas. It’s About Making Ideas Happen

When inspiration strikes, ideas flow freely. But seeing those ideas through to completion is another thing entirely. That’s why 99U focuses on the hard part — idea execution. This May, we’ll bring together a handful of the world’s most productive creative visionaries and researchers to share pragmatic insights on how to push great ideas forward, create incredible art, build businesses, and change the world.

Learn more about the 2013 99U Conference here.

From 99U // Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist

99U is Behance’s education arm, where we share tips & insights on making ideas happen. Through a web magazine, bestselling book and annual conference, we share best practices from the world’s most productive creative people. 


Illustration: Oscar Ramos Orozco

One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.

As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition.

Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. The Big Five are the characteristics that reflect the biggest differences between people in the way they act. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities. Some people enjoy the prospect of doing something new and thinking about new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities.

Keep reading the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist here. 

From 99U // The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders

99U is Behance’s education arm, where we share tips & insights on making ideas happen. Through a web magazine, bestselling book and annual conference, we share best practices from the world’s most productive creative people. 

Two candidates are being interviewed for a leadership position in your company. Both have strong resumes, but while one seems to be bursting with new and daring ideas, the other comes across as decidedly less creative (though clearly still a smart cookie). Who gets the job? 

The answer, unfortunately, is usually the less creative candidate. This fact may or may not surprise you – you yourself may have been the creative candidate who got the shaft. But what you’re probably wondering is, why?

After all, it’s quite clear who should be getting the job. Studies show that leaders who are more creative are in fact better able to effect positive change in their organizations, and are better at inspiring others to follow their lead.

And yet, according to recent research there is good reason to believe that the people with the most creativity aren’t given the opportunity to lead, because of a process that occurs (on a completely unconscious level) in the mind of everyone who has ever evaluated an applicant for a leadership position.

Keep reading The Bias Against Creatives as Leaders here. 

From 99U // Jonathan Adler: Keep Other People’s Opinions Out Of Your Creative Process

99U is Behance’s education arm, where we share tips & insights on making ideas happen. Through a web magazine, bestselling book and annual conference, we share best practices from the world’s most productive creative people. 

Jonathan Adler is now synonymous with the irreverent designs — pottery, housewares, furniture and beyond — that he sells around the world, but it all started with a college professor who didn’t believe in him. After receiving discouraging feedback about his ambitions to be a potter, Adler wandered around New York City doing odd jobs that usually ended with him getting fired.

After some soul-searching, Adler returned to his true love, pottery, and learned the value of ignoring the expectations of others and following your dream. Here, he injects his trademark wit while sharing how he found his underlying message of “irreverent luxury” as his business evolved from pottery to pillows to rooms.

Adler preaches that we should keep other people’s opinions out of our creative process and attributes his success to his disdain of focus groups and feedback.
Keep reading and watch the video here. 

From 99U: How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back

99U is Behance’s education arm, where we share tips & insights on making ideas happen. Through a web magazine, bestselling book and annual conference, we share best practices from the world’s most productive creative people. 

Join a gym and one of the first things the instructor does is talk about your goals – what exactly do you hope to achieve by hoisting weights and pounding the treadmill? Apply for an educational course, and you find yourself bombarded with promotional literature. Here’s the future you: suited, booted and smug. What they’re doing – the gym guy and the marketing department – is highlighting end results. They’re hoping to lure you in by showing you what you could achieve, what you can become.

A new study by a pair of researchers at the University of Chicago and the Korea Business School shows that this approach has some benefits. Focusing on goals fires up your intentions to engage in the activities that will help you achieve those goals. But there’s a major downside. Stay focused on your goals and you spoil your experience of the activities you’ll need to pursue. In turn, that makes it far more likely that you’ll drop out early and fail to achieve the very goals that you’re so focused on.

Keep reading here.

From the 99% Think Tank // Are You Ready to Be Lucky?

The 99% is Behance’s think tank where we share tips & insights on making ideas happen. Through a web magazine, bestselling book and annual conference, we share best practices from the world’s most productive creative people. 

We’re at an interesting crossroads in terms of careers. We still want them, but they don’t exist anymore. In the US, the typical job tenure is now 4 years, with most workers cycling through about 11 jobs in their lifetime.

If the 20th-century career was a ladder that we climbed from one predictable rung to the next, the 21st-century career is more like a broad rock face that we are all free climbing. There’s no defined route, and we must use our own ingenuity, training, and strength to rise to the top. We must make our own luck.

The lightning-fast evolution of technology means that jobs can now become indispensable or outmoded in a matter of years, or even months. Who knew what a “Community Manager” was ten years ago? What about an “iPad App Designer”? Or what about “Chief Scientist” (at LinkedIn)?

Click here to keep reading or to check out more insights from the 99.