People are biased against creative ideas, studies find

I think this is the downside of intelligence. You see so many patterns you start to believe that everything falls into one. New ideas are assumed to be no better than old ones.

I don't think it should matter where an idea comes from. I read an article from Fred Wilson that mentioned (in a good way) how surprised a CEO was to find so many good ideas coming from customer service reps (who have the most direct experience with customers). I won't assume you ignored interns, but I think stereotyping by position is a good recipe for overlooking opportunities, just to save yourself some mental fatigue.

"Our greatness and efficiency crumbles away not all at once but continually... the everyday, hourly pitiableness of our environment which we constantly overlook, the thousand tendrils of this or that little, fainthearted sensation which grows out of our neighborhood, out of our job, our social life, out of the way we divide up the day."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The study sounds dubious. (Though I do agree with the conclusion, but for other reasons).

> For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.

As if no reasonable person could ever have a negative reaction to that? I hope this wasn't their only test.

Personally, I think most people are biased against creative ideas because most people are concrete thinkers (as opposed to abstract thinkers). Their motto in life is "better the evil you know". Now all you have to do is test people on whether they're abstract or concrete thinkers, then correlate that to how they react to new ideas. I think you will find most concrete thinkers will react negatively to creative ideas that haven't been tried before.

The fact is I shy the hell away form confrontation because creativity vs society problems has existed my entire life.

As a kid I was treated really bad by there children. Teased constantly as ebign a weirdo because I thought differently, physical attacks from kids as the awards kept piling in. I remember getting a maths award, had to get up on stage to receive it. On the way out of the auditorium I was punched in the side of the head and some other kid ripped up the paper certificate. It wasn't nice, I was scared of other kids and went very quiet/introverted and focused on escapism... which ironically probably made the creative as I spent all my time imagining, drawing, reading.

I have boxes of awards, I think I've won some sort of award every year of my life without trying. This year I won an advertising award. I've never worked in advertising, I just got approached as I was running an online news team. I suggested an idea, prototyped, it sold, industry choked on how left field it was, and now I have an award for being the top advertising creative person of 2010.

I'm quite an extrovert these days as I got past most of that sort of stuff... but its still there. University changed me heaps, when all of a sudden all the girls liked me. I got my confidence back, became somewhat of a people person and cavalier amongst the ladies.

Most people who know me outside of work wouldn't even consider me as employable. The crap I went through as a kid has stayed with me, I never like to expose any true abilities I have unless I have to.

Most as people know me as a comedian, drunken musician, and an artist. Very few people could guessed I have been a contracting and designing major infrastructure projects for governments, telecommunications projects. I have no formal training in computing at all. All I know I picked up as a child, and through short term contract work. My tertiary training is in conceptual artwork and minoring in music production. To look at me you'd probably call me a stereotypical hipster. Stretched ear lobes, tattoos, and a suit at a board meeting with directors of multinational corporations is a bizarre mix ;)

I didn't know I was in the 0.1% until recently, went more or less my whole career just trying to be average Joe blogs who had good ideas and got promoted quickly. To be honest most of the time I would show my manager something (or suggest it), and then they would force me into a situation where I would have to take me idea to the business, sell what ever it is, and defend it from criticism etc... I would usually try and get out of it if I could but often people don't quite understand the concept enough they don't feel comfortable making the sell.

It was only working on a project and management decided to do a team building day. They brought in psychologists to do pshycho-analysis so we could see each others benefits and flaws, and they where blown away by my results and offered me to participate in some other tests they had (as I turned out to be an anomaly and they don't often just stumble across prime research people).

Worse than that, focusing on oneself is toxic to creativity in the first place. Wile E. Coyote's business card says "Genius". But it's the Roadrunner who is in a state of creative flow.

Really good ideas often don't seem like much even to the person who's having them. They're fragile. It takes tolerance and suspension of judgment to allow them to survive even for half a second. This is a form of listening, one that goes hand in hand with the ability to listen to others, which makes sense since creativity is also a kind of other.