Making Ideas Happen

With a great passion for creativity, Scott Belsky founded the “Behance”network designed for creative professionals. This network has observed that success does not depend on generating fantastic ideas, but rather on their implementation. Indeed, although every innovation necessarily begins with an idea, not every idea leads to an innovation! Hence, the importance of developing your ability to execute: as the most challenging part isn’t finding the idea, but carrying it out.

Based on interviews with hundreds of extremely prolific creative peopleand teams, Scott Belsky has identified three characteristics common to these “serialinventors”: a well-developed sense of organization and systematic focus on action; the ability to draw upon the strengths of their community; and leadership skills that stimulatetheir own efforts and those of their team.

This book breaks down and successively develops these three characteristics. In particular,it explains how to modify organizational routines and cultivate the tendency to take action;how to attract collaboration and support from the community, and finally, how to developrequisite leadership skills. With a wealth of handy tips and concrete, well-chosen illustrations,this book is a useful guide for action. Purposely provocative, the author does not hesitateto run counter to common sense, as demonstrated by his recommendation that managerstake action even when they aren’t convinced, surround themselves with skeptics and giveup trying to keep their ideas confidential!

If you are among those who generate many ideas, but have trouble implementing themconcretely — or if you want to improve your general project execution and organizationabilities, this book will help you. Through its pragmatic approach to creativity, it is, in thewords of Ji Lee, creative director of the Google Creative Lab, “a Swiss knife for your ideas.”