Have you ever dreamt of receiving a large sum of cash to pursue your creative dreams? You may have heard that the MacArthur Foundation just named twenty-three very surprised fellows as the recipients of this year’s “genius grant,” an unrestricted award of $500,000 to spend on projects of their choice. There is no application process for the award. Rather, recipients are chosen on the merit of their current work and its potential to further blossom with the time and resources that the grant money will afford them. Because the awards are often given to those who demonstrate high levels of creativity and innovation, I thought I’d share this and a few related  creativity links in honor of this notable event. The winners range from an Installation Artist (Jorge Pardo) to a Computer Security Specialist (Dawn Song). Interestingly, eight (yes, eight!) of the twenty-three winners hail from California!

• The Foundation assembled short videos about each recipient that you can watch on their site: Meet the 2010 MacArthur Fellows.
• The Harvard Business Review wrote up a nice article on how innovative ideas come from being graced with slack time to dream novel things up:  Harvard Business Review: Award your own genius grants
• Where do creative ideas come from? Steven Johnson sketches out his thoughts in this four minute video. Four measly minutes well-spent!

And I have some questions for you…

What project are you currently working on that you’d like to expand upon if you had more resources? How would you expand up on them? If you were given half a million dollars to develop your next big idea, how would you spend it?