Earlier this week some colleagues and I attended a fantastic gathering of business and political leaders called the Emerging Issues Forum. The theme of the forum—interestingly enough for a bunch of business folks—was creativity, and speakers included some of my favorite thinkers/authors who analyze the future of business:

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rottman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of The Responsibility Virus, The Opposable Mind, and a new book on design thinking called The Design of Business.

Tom Kelley, General Manager of legendary design firm IDEO, and author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown also has a book out on the subject on Design Thinking, called Change by Design, which my friend Jonathan Opp wrote a nice review of here.

Daniel Pink, bestselling author of A Whole New Mind, a book that has been extremely influential in my thinking about how the left brain and right brain can play nice in the business world. Pink also has a new book out, called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

During their talks, I couldn’t help but notice all three touched on a similar thematic: the crucial role that inspiring creativity plays in driving innovation.

[Read the rest of this post over at opensource.com]

I was catching up on a couple of my favorite bloggers earlier today when a theme of optimism emerged. Last week Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week described President Obama’s speech to congress in his blog as “designerly.” Later I found Matt Asay’s blog from a few days earlier focusing on Obama’s interest in open source technology.

Since the earliest days of his campaign, it is clear that President Obama possesses a genuine understanding of design and open source thinking. He is a gifted communicator who aligns perfectly the form/media of his messages with the content he’s delivering. His principles, words and actions are in sync. When he speaks of ‘bottoms up’ problem solving, he ‘gets’ it far beyond intellectual and competitive theory arguments. I’d say that’s a good set of attributes to describe the ‘designer’ of the future.

Bush was our first MBA president. I think it’s fair to claim Obama as the first, modern ‘design thinking’ president. I can only assume his work as a community organizer helped him realize the deep cultural underpinnings that are necessary as a platform to put collaborative innovation/tranformation to practice. But collaborative design cultures are fragile. It is hard for chickens to collaborate with the fox. Or, in Obama’s case, FOX.

It’s hard to overstate the obstacles that real change will face. When I worked at Red Hat my friend Todd Barr coined the term ‘colloberation’ which we used when referring to participants more interested in forcing others to ‘collaborate’ with their agenda than collaborating authentically. I’m reminded of that term now as I watch the Republican leadership desperately attempting to position the new administration as arrogant, partisan and non-collaborative.

This new form of collaboration works. The open source software development community is a wonderful example of the value, speed, efficiency and competitive advantage radical collaboration can ignite. Open source demands transparency, freedom, authenticity, commitment and courage. Roger Martin’s book— The Responsibility Virus— offers a great recipe for how to apply it.

The creative communities of design and open source should not be fooled into thinking any of this will be easy. It will be hard work. But it certainly feels great to be optimistic again!