On September 12, Charles Leadbeater will open the Incubate festival week with a lecture on social innovation and the role the arts can play in this process. Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He is Tony Blair’s favourite corporate thinker. He has advised companies, cities and governments on innovation strategy and drew on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity. This book charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.

In 2009, Charles Leadbeater wrote the essay ‘The Art of With’; a most interesting and highly recommended text on the practices of the (avant garde) art and how it stands in opposition to the art and the world of to and for:

Often in the name of doing things for people traditional, hierarchical organisations end up doing things to people. Companies say they work for consumers but often treat them like targets to be aimed at, wallets to be emptied, desires to be excited and manipulated.

The arts, and the modern avant garde in particular, has stood in opposition to this commodified, regimented world of to and for. The arts offer a space for contemplation and reflection, challenge and controversy, higher meanings and deeper purpose. Yet in its way the modern art world and modern arts institutions embody the principles of to and for just as powerfully as the modern factory or school.

The modern, iconoclastic avant garde starts from the idea of separation and specialism. To produce good art, artists have to separate themselves off from the society around them – physically, emotionally, morally, socially – the artist as a self-styled resistance fighter pitted against the trivialising distractions of popular culture. The untrammelled imagination of the avant garde artist is one of the last redoubts against bourgeoise, traditional, commodified culture.

Further on in the essay, Leadbeater goes on talking about the resemblances and role of the web within this context; how the art and the web of with drive innovation:

The appeal of the web, however, stems from the way it connects to and amplifies the idea of with in other areas of life. The working ethos of open source communities, Wikipedia and the web more generally is a culture in which people work with people. In the world of the web the main principle is that you can freely communicate with anyone you need to regardless of title or hierarchy.

Innovation invariably comes from a version of with: creative collaboration and conversation in which people share and blend their ideas. With should be the guiding principle of politics in liberal communities: politicians working with people to find solutions to shared problems. People want a more gown up, bottom up, conversational politics rather than being spun messages or broadcast to from on high.

Download the full essay by Charles Leadbeater here in a pdf file. The text is licensed under Creative Commons. Presale for the Charles Leadbeater lecture & panel has begun. Tickets are for sale through the website of Incubate.

After the success of his book The Pirate’s Dilemma, Matt Mason is of course talking all over the world about innovation in the cultural scene, youth cultures and how to compete with pirates. Here are some interesting videos on some of his talks, in preparation to his keynote speech at the Incubate Pirate Conference on September 17. First off, here’s a great promotional clip for his book, which is a great introduction in the subject of his book, if you haven’t read it yet:

Remember, you can still get a digital copy of the book via the Pirate’s Dilemma website, and you’re able to name your own price for it. Next is a video of a speech Matt gave at the Deutscher Trendtag last year. In this presentation, he discusses the topics of his book. Entitled The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism, he talks about how underground cultures have brought on the most innovative ideas, which later often have been adopted by many businesses. He also explains how to compete with piracy, stating that it not only has negative effects but that pirates sometimes also create solutions that literally change people’s lives. Again, his conclusion is very clear and clever: if you want to beat pirates, copy them:

Here is a very interesting talk by Hank Shocklee which serves as great introduction material for the Incubate Pirate Conference. At the Red Bull Music Academy, Hank Shocklee talks about how The Bomb Squad founded their sample-collage production methods in the 1980s, and about making Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Here, you can hear Hank talk about more technical stuff; how they would go around the studio, putting all sorts of different found sounds together, without even being able to digitally edit their works. He goes on talking a little bit about maintaining full creative control while signed to a major, the role of Chuck D within these sample-heavy productions, the difference between digital and analog sound, and what Hank looks for in sounds that he re-uses in his own productions.

“I remember mixing a bunch of records and we were just bringing people that were out in the lobby to help us, like make our mutes, you know? I mean, one time, Fab 5 Freddy was happening to hang out in the studio: “Yo, Freddy, come on,” run in the studio and we would all grab like three faders or something each. And we needed to do like a mute way, you want a mute at all the instrumentation and just have the vocal in there and then come back on. You have to wait for that part of the song going by and then everybody goes: “OK, one, two…” and everybody had the beat on, the same beat the same time because the minute you got somebody coming a little late or a little early, that whole take has got to get done over. So everything has got to get started over again. So the process of making records back then was very much a team method. This is why we had the Bomb Squad, because everybody at the time had to have a specific function and a specific duty. And especially from the things we were doing with records, combing through records, finding the right sound or the right part or the right drumbreak or the right turnaround or the right horn hit or the right tambourine loop or the right spoken word piece, the right bass piece. That’s hours amongst hours on top of hours of combing through the records.”

In relation to this talk, you can download the full sample set that The Bomb Squad used for the production of It Takes a Nation of Millions… via this page. Make sure to catch Hank Shocklee at the Incubate Pirate Conference if you want to hear more about his productions and his views on copyright and piracy. Tickets are still available for Pay What You Want right here.

On September 17, Matt Mason will give a keynote speech at the Incubate Pirate Conference. Mason is the bestselling author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, the first book in the history of the world to hit the number one spot on Amazon’s economics/free enterprise bestseller list, and the rap bestseller list, at the same time.

In advance to the conference, you can download The Pirate’s Dilemma from Mason’s own site. The price is entirely up to you. Of course, we can only recommend you to download it and pay the price you think it is worth. It truly is an inspirational book.

In his own words: “There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”