THOMAS FRANK [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] [s2If current_user_is(subscriber)] Become a member to access video. Learn More. [/s2If] [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Free Article: Please sign in or create a free account to access the leading collection of peer-reviewed work on ethnographic practice. To access video, Become an EPIC Member. [/s2If] [s2If is_user_logged_in()] 1. Let me tell you about a flash of creative insight that I had last year. It started with a problem I had. Books I read and people I knew had been warning me that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties—financial engineering—had come back to bite us. And in other departments, we actually seemed to be going backward....