the candle problem

Below is another TED talk. This one's about creativity, incentivizing, and why the standard business model is such a poor motivator for innovation.

This is stuff we all knew (hopefully) on an intuitive level, but Dan Pink gives us the goods from a series of scientific studies that suggest reward is bad for the right side of your brain.

Because I work for a creative communication design company, this video is particularly of interest. We're branching into marketing--a field which is becoming increasingly (almost exclusively) data-driven by a measurement system called "analytics"--which is a great way to stifle creativity. First of all, data-driven metrics are no help if you want to try anything new. There's no data set for something that doesn't exist yet. Will marketing techniques threaten to poach the Pink Elephant Group?

But I suppose that's the problem that's facing the creative mind in general, isn't it?