Reporting from Picnic’08 in Amsterdam: The Power of Collaborative Creation – day one

25 Sep Reporting from Picnic’08 in Amsterdam: The Power of Collaborative Creation – day one

By Doris Obermair

Yesterday Amsterdam’s annual Cross Media Week, commonly known as Picnic, kicked off with a keynote speech by Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think. An expert in innovation and creativity he made a strong point for participative creation and open-innovation in science and business and said we could understand the current shift as going from a «to and for world» to a «with and by world» in which Internet has enabled people to work, build and learn collectively without physical structure, established frameworks or fixed revenue schemes.
Nevertheless, the big question still is whether this is just a fleeting trend or a permanent change in the way we manage innovation and organizations? And if it was a permanent change will we be able to successfully manage what today might seem a random and chaotic organization of knowledge creation by loosely connected people? Leadbeater closed his keynote quoting Internet-founder Tim Berners-Lee  who when asked about whether we were loading too many hopes into the Internet, answered that the danger was actually to ask too little from the Internet and going on doing things as we always did.

The first day of the conference rolled out with various other speaker, like artist Aaron Koblin, (The Sheep Market project), Stefan Agamanolis CEO of Distance Lab and a panel discussion on real-time social webs and closed with «Conducting Creativity», a fabulous speech by musician and conductor Itay Talgam, founder of the maestro programme. He intelligently compared exploring collaborative creativity with the magical relationship between audience, musicians and conductor in a concert hall.
In the beginning all is noisy, each single member is warming up and fine-tuning his own instrument, creating a moment of collective chaos he as a conductor highly enjoys.
But then he asks, who do we credit for the outcome of the performance? Who ads value to a piece of Mozart? The conductor, the ensemble, the audience? Isn’t a mix of all parts? What is the value added of a classical concert anyway? And who is able to take a group of individuals to creative greatness? The rigorous, authoritarian Ricardo Muti, the inexpressive Richard Strauss, the passionate Herbert von Karajan who often conducted with his eyes close, the cheerful and expressive Carlos Kleiber or Leonard Bernstein who regarded music as a dialogue? Essential questions to a conference program that explores the new rules and dynamics of mass creativity and innovation.

Stay tuned for day 2 summary.