The Creativity Crisis excavates the root causes of America's innovation slow-down, showing why revolutionary insights are no longer chased by young talent. Economically and socially, caution has overtaken creation. This book is ultimately a roadmap for reinvigorating innovation within the system of science.

If you aren’t innovating, stagnation isn’t far away. Ministry leaders carry the burden of keeping their organizations lean, focused, and relevant. The stakes are especially high for churches and other organizations that fulfill the Great Commission. When souls are on the line, there’s no room for bureaucratic bloat or sustaining a cumbersome infrastructure. It’s up to the leadership—that’s you—to realize where the organization is in maintenance mode and find ways to innovate even when the growth curve has slowed and the team has started to grow complacent. Using missions disruptor William Carey as an example, Ted Esler shows how you, too, can innovate in ways that change the ministry landscape. Esler will help you keep an eye on your “eccliosystem”—the ecclesial ecosystem in which you exist. You’ll learn about the four stages of organizational culture—disrupting, innovating, sustaining, and stagnating—and gain strategies for staying in that sweet spot where innovations keep coming and stagnation can’t take hold. The gospel of Jesus Christ never grows stale. Don’t let your ministry ever forget it!

"A leading educational psychologist offers an exciting model for nurturing creativity starting in our schools and extending across the arts, sciences, and industry"--

“If you’ve been looking for something different to level up your health, fitness, and personal growth, this is it.”—Melissa Urban, Whole30 CEO and New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Boundaries “Michael Easter’s genius is that he puts data around the edges of what we intuitively believe. His work has inspired many to change their lives for the better.”—Dr. Peter Attia, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outlive Discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild—from the author of Scarcity Brain, coming in September! In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Easter’s journey to understand our evolutionary need to be challenged takes him to meet the NBA’s top exercise scientist, who uses an ancient Japanese practice to build championship athletes; to the mystical country of Bhutan, where an Oxford economist and Buddhist leader are showing the world what death can teach us about happiness; to the outdoor lab of a young neuroscientist who’s found that nature tests our physical and mental endurance in ways that expand creativity while taming burnout and anxiety; to the remote Alaskan backcountry on a demanding thirty-three-day hunting expedition to experience the rewilding secrets of one of the last rugged places on Earth; and more. Along the way, Easter uncovers a blueprint for leveraging the power of discomfort that will dramatically improve our health and happiness, and perhaps even help us understand what it means to be human. The Comfort Crisis is a bold call to break out of your comfort zone and explore the wild within yourself.

The recent financial and economic crisis has spurred a lot of interest among scholars and public audience. Strangely enough, the impact of the crisis on innovation has been largely underestimated. This books can be regarded as a complementary reading for those interested in the effect of the crisis with a particular focus on Europe.

From recurring episodes of great depression, oil crises, political crises, wars, debt crises, to the ongoing climate change, there is a constant pressure on businesses to cope with critical events. However, throughout history, crises have been pivotal in advancing businesses and societies. This contributed volume approaches crisis not simply as a source of problems, but also as a set of choices. It seeks to explore critical events as possible opportunities for sustainability, through process improvement, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Chapters reveal that times of crisis provide opportunities for new start-ups, creativity, resilience, organisational change, and revitalisation. This book also emphasises the importance of sustainability, driven either by the market or as a response to critical events. Within the wider attempt to explore avenues for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at times of crisis, the book is loosely organised in three thematic sections: organisational responses to crisis; digitisation, and how technology facilitates or hinders sustainability under conditions of crisis; and SMEs, Family Firms (FF), Entrepreneurship, which explores how critical events offer opportunities for innovation.

"Cycles, crises and innovation are the major economic forces that shape capitalist economies. Using a critical realist political economy approach, the analysis in this fine work is based on the works of Michal Kalecki and Joseph Schumpeter - both of whom identify these three dynamic forces as plotting the path of economic development. Jerry Courvisanos' thought-provoking book examines how the rise of capital through investment enshrines innovation in profit and power which in turn determines the course of cycles and crises." -- Back cover.

Resilience has emerged as a recurrent notion to explain how territorial socio-economic systems adapt successfully (or not) to negative events. In this book, the authors use resilience as a bridging notion to connect different types of theoretical and empirical approaches to help understand the impacts of economic turbulence at the system and actor levels. The book provides a unique overview of the financial crisis and the important dimension of innovation dynamics for regional resilience. It also offers an engaging debate as to how regional resilience can be improved and explores the social aspects of vulnerability, resilience and innovation.