When Ned Canty from NYTVF approached Mint about hosting an event, he was keen to avoid the typical panel format. He wanted something that focused on the creative challenges of producing cross-platform entertainment.
Inspired by Wikinomics, I thought I'd try an open source approach to the ideas development process.
Creativity Live was a mass-participation brainstorm between three sharp digital minds (Ian Schafer from Deep Focus, Paul Kontonis from For Your Imagination and Tom Ajello from Poke NY) and 150 audience members.
The plan was that Tom, Paul and Ian would each pick a brief out of a hat. They would then work with the audience to come up with as many ideas as possible, bringing it all together as a single master idea, all in 15 minutes.
And did it work?
I was a little nervous going into the session. I had never seen anything like it done before. I didn’t know if the audience would get involved.
It turned out people loved suggesting ideas. As soon as the first brief was read out, our volunteer note-takers were working hard to keep up.
The success of the session was largely due to Tom, Paul and Ian’s ability to guide the brainstorms and extract the best ideas from the crowd. It was fantastic to see such pros in action.
Thanks to everyone for participating. Thanks especially to Ned and the New York Television Festival for allowing us to host the event.
We hope to post each of the three ideas shortly, so watch this space.
