imusti Idea Work: Lessons of the Extraordinary in Everyday Creativity

What does it take to find oil in an area where many have tried, but failed? What does it take to design buildings that become prize-winning cultural landmarks? And what can the best architects, oil explorers, business lawyers, journalists, and business developers within banking and trading analysis have in common? Idea Work can provide the answers. This book builds on a four-year research project and describes what extraordinary idea work looks like in practice. The authors take you behind the scenes of six industry leading companies and show how surprisingly similarly they work when they are working creatively to develop and realize new ideas. The book gives us, for example, a glimpse of how Snøhetta designed the Opera in Oslo and the 9/11 memorial in New York, and how explorers at Statoil discovered the most oil of all oil companies in the world in 2011. Narratives are presented on how prepping, sketches, pin-ups, drama, wonder, and punk are important aspects of the extraordinary. Examples are supported by theory, placing this book at the forefront of international research. Idea Work will appeal to practitioners, students and researchers. It recounts engaging stories from actual production processes and combines new theoretical perspectives with practical advice. It will be of interest to anyone working with development processes and projects that depend on new ideas. From a professional standpoint, this book is an uncommon contribution to describing and understanding creativity as collective and grounded in everyday activity.