Hey it's Rich Florida again, now we're really deep into the course. And we're covering really why cities are creative and how they really help motivate and mobilize creative people. And, as you know, I wrote a whole book about that, Rise of the Creative Class. And then next week we'll be turning to well some of the challenges and divides that have happened in cities, particularly in the advanced world in advanced countries like the United States, and Canada, and Europe. But also some of the challenges, divides that are occurring in the emerging economies in the rapidly urbanizing parts of the world. So today I want to cover a couple of questions that have to do with creative cities, and innovation in cities that come from all of you. So the first question is do I personally agree with the notion that creative people are spurred on by competition? That competition makes creative people better, more creative and makes them up their game. And do I think that creative people understand this? Well let me take the second part of that question first and then unpack the rest. In my view there are a lot creative people who are of course somewhat naive. They're very well intentioned and very well meaning, and when I wrote the book The Rise of the Creative Class and interviewed a lot of creative people and read a lot about creative people. I came to understand that one set of creative people think that really it's all about collaborating and being nice to one another, and holding hands, and singing Kumbaya, so to speak. To turn a phrase. And I think that's true that creative people do collaborate. That innovators do share ideas. That entrepreneurs talk to other entrepreneurs. That musicians or artists talk to one another. They form a culture or in artistic they form a scene. But I think the question is spot on. That really what drives creativity, and I hate to say it, and I hate to burst people's bubbles, is competition. What really makes a great songwriter, take Bob Dylan or Lennon and McCartney or current day rap or hip hop artists, they're competing with one another to be recognized as a great songwriter, as a great wordsmith. Take great artists, they are really competing with one another and they're competing with history, all the other artists in history to be recognized. Innovators, and you hear it all the time, you hear it with athletes. I want to be the best of all time, I want to be the greatest. And I think the two really go together. That what really spurs creativity is people packing themselves together in kind of dense, interesting creative cities where they learn from each other. They look over their shoulders, they watch what other people are doing, they talk to their peers. But at the end of the day what I think spurs truly great creativity is competition. And if you look at the great creative places throughout all of history,whether that's Athens, or Rome, or Milan, or Vienna, or Berlin, or Paris, or New York, or London, or San Francisco Bay area in tech today. I think one thing you'll find is that those places are not only open to collegiality, and collaboration, and cooperation, but they're some of the most competitive places on Earth. So thanks so much for that really interesting question that I think helps us unpack creativity. It's cooperative dimensions, it's competitive dimensions and how those come together in a city. The second question this week is also very interesting, and it comes from the perspective of kind of competition in industries, in creative industries, in innovative industries, as opposed to competition among creative people. And the question is this, do you get great innovative and creative spurts when two different things come together? For example, when computer science and artificial intelligence come together in machine learning. Or more recently as this questioner or this learner asked, what about the idea of financial technology, or so-called FINTEC. When new information technologies and software come into an established industry, like finance. And the question adds to this, isn't it really interesting and kind of super innovative or super creative when new technologies not only create a kind of new industry, like create a new software industry or a new personal computer industry, when they create a combination of an old industry with a new one? One example of that would be financial technology, taking new technology and transforming the financial industry. Another one, and older one would be the biotech industry. When a whole set of new genetic technologies came on stream and transformed the existing chemical and pharmaceutical industries. So I think this is absolutely right. One of my great mentors and teachers at Carnegie Mellon, the late Herbert Simon. Who made contributions, he won a Nobel Prize in economics, was actually a political scientist by discipline, made contributions to decision making theory, to organizational theory, became a leading computer scientist, helped invent the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Herb would always say, where you tend to get big new advances is when two disciplines or two fields or two industries collide and you create something new. It's kind of like a dialectic. But this question is even deeper and richer and it's about what happens when you get an existing incumbent industry and a new technology? I already mentioned biotech. Another one is what's happening to the automotive industry today. You take a big, old, incumbent industry, the big three so to speak, and then you add a couple of new technologies. You add electronic power plants, electric power and electric batteries. And then you add to that kind of information technology which lets you get a driver on demand. And you see a whole industry that is being reshaped in ways that who knows what'll happen? Will Detroit be the winner? Will Stuttgart in Germany be the winner? Will Japan, Tokyo and Nagoya be the winner? Will the Silicone Valley in the San Francisco Bay area be the winner? But the point is that in advanced societies and highly innovative societies we often get the rise of not only new technologies. But we get the rise of new innovations and technologies that transform existing industries and displacing, this is what the great economists of innovation, Joseph Schumpeter he had a word for it, he called it creative destruction. When new technologies and new entrepreneurs and new startups not only create new things and new technological wizardry, but they create new technologies that transform, and disrupt, and change existing industry so another great question. So one last thing for this week. Please continue your participation in the discussion forums. Continue to ask me questions. An also importantly continue to try to have a dialog between and among one another on those discussion forms. Your participation and your ability to interact with other learners in this course is so vital. And what is so important in making this course great and from you getting the most you can get out of it.
