Culturematic - Cultural Machines That Spur Innovation

This book was hidden in the business marketing book section in the back of the Barnes & Noble.  Right next to the books on HTML5 and CSS3, the reason for the visit to the bricks and mortar world of technical references.  (I love my ebook readers, all of them, but they generally stink for technical references, at least of the programming variety.)  Culturematic looked a bit lonely sitting among the Google Adwords for Dummies books.  So there it was, black cover with a charmingly retro font screaming about how to create and execute breakthrough ideas.  And it has a section on the creation of fantasy football.  Skip the manuals, buy the book with the colorful cover.

Grant McCracken uses the framework of new millennial cultural happenings to explain how ideas converge and evolve to enable contemporary discovery, how we explore our world.  How people are working and thinking and exploring and doing it all at one time.  Its a fascinating look at where innovation is happening, how it is happening, and how we react to it and build business models around it.  You'll be surprised.



Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football . . . Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough Ideas by Grant McCracken — "Culturematics..create innovation. For Culturematics, there is no important difference between the personal projects and the corporate..between things that are useful and things that are artistic. Both begin as an inkling, a stirring suspicion that the present order of things is not the inevitable order of things, that there is something else out there. This is what the Culturematic is for, exploring a suspicion." A new millenium view on innovation and how it happens, hunches and explorations from all over the place.