Head of Investor Relations, Littelfuse
Search every verified David Kelley interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Kelley, co-founder of IDEO and the Stanford d.school, has discussed the concept of "creative confidence," which he described as "the combination of the natural ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them." In a 2014 talk at Google, Kelley and his brother Tom Kelley promoted their book *Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All*. Kelley stated that a key approach to innovation is to "come in from the human side, like what do people value, what's meaningful for people, and then go out and try to find technologies and business solutions to those problems." He also emphasized the importance of small experiments, saying that "it's all about starting a bunch of little brush fires in different places in the company and hoping that they kind of catch on and grow together." In a 2012 TED talk, Kelley recounted a childhood story about a friend who stopped making art after a peer's criticism, and he argued that many people "opt out of thinking of themselves as creative" due to similar experiences. He described a process of using "a series of small successes" to help people overcome the fear of not being creative, citing the work of psychologist Albert Bandura. Kelley stated that his "big audacious goal" is "getting creative confidence into as many kids as possible, especially through K-12 education."
“You have to have support from the top of the company that the experiments are allowed to happen. But it's all really about small experiments. It's all about starting a bunch of little brush fires in different places in the company and hoping that they kind of catch on and grow together.”
“The best approach is to come in from the human side, like what do people value, what's meaningful for people, and then go out and try to find technologies and business solutions to those problems. So that seems to be, for us, the number one thing. This empathy for people is the best way to lead to innovation.”
“What we find is that you have to have support from the top of the company that the experiments are allowed to happen. But it's all really about small experiments. It's all about starting a bunch of little brush fires in different places in the company and hoping that they kind of catch on and grow together.”
“Even at Google, you're not deep enough involved with the people that you're trying to make raving fans. We just keep going deeper and deeper with the people we care about, with the extreme users, with the central personas. It just seems that they more quickly resonate with some things than they do the others.”
“Creative confidence is the combination of the natural ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them. I've spent a ton of my life in Japan. I think it's a tremendously creative country. Sometimes, in modern Japan, people don't have the courage to stand up and say, this is a good idea. They fe...”
“If you're not failing, wow, you're just not taking any risks. It's like, I want to learn to ski, but I never want to fall down, right? Good luck with that.”
“We didn't fully understand the community we were working in. It turns out an incoming phone call on your cellphone is free, but an outgoing phone call is the one you pay for. So nobody is going to pay for a phone call to tell you about sanitation issues. We had to change our approach to get data.”
“You have to prototype the alternative ideas quickly and cheaply to get feedback. Then the winners start to emerge. This helps when you have lots of ideas and need to move forward.”
“The big audacious goal for us is getting creative confidence into as many kids as possible, especially through K-12 education. When we succeed, it's transformative.”
Tom and David Kelley stop by the Googleplex for a talk on creativity. This conversation was moderated by Frederik Pferdt, Head of ...
http://www.ted.com Is your school or workplace divided into "creatives" versus practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, ...
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