Red Bull High Performance Team Unveils Largest Study of Creative Styles and Invites the Public to Participate

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Dec. 1, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Red Bull's High Performance Team, a group of experts who focus on developing elite performance models and supporting artists and athletes including Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall, today unveiled the Hacking Creativity project.  Hacking Creativity is the largest empirical study of creative styles in history, providing an unprecedented interactive exploration of how innovators tap their creative potential.  The goal is to understand the creative process and the diversity of ways in which people create to not only unleash creativity around the world, but potentially better utilize creativity to help solve some of today's greatest issues.

A simple and fun short survey at HackingCreativity.com defines 20 dimensions of creative style and matches people to 500 innovators in an interactive public map of creative styles.  This diverse group ranges from DJ and producer/creator Skrillex to surfer Ian Walsh to award-winning composer and aerospace engineer Mike Paul Hughes and includes musicians, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, CEOs, technologists, comedians, athletes, chefs, magicians and even a memory champion.  The survey asks if the individual sees him or herself more as a multitasker or prefers to focus on one project at a time; if they work best alone or in a more collaborative environment; or, if they are more creative if they take a walk in nature, for example.  The project is already busting commonly held myths. One clear result of the study is that there is no one formula for creative success.  At the same, there are broad patterns visible in the habits leading to pioneering ideas and actions.  And, with the public's participation, the creative style clusters will continue to evolve as more data is gathered.

By taking the survey, participants will be given their creative style profile and matched with thought leaders they are most similar to in how they create.  They can then explore the Hacking Creativity map to view the creative profiles of those most like them and also those who vary the most from their style.  They can be inspired by this network of 500 innovative thought leaders to boost their own creative power. 

While creativity has been the subject of scientific research for decades, there has been surprisingly little research on the diversity of ways in which people create. In fact, more than 2,000 papers on creative research from the past 15 years are available as part of Hacking Creativity – and of those only about 15 mention "creative style".  To unleash our collective creative potential, Hacking Creativity aims to better broaden our understanding of the creative landscape by exploring how original ideas are born and implemented, and the Red Bull High Performance Team wants to share it with the world.

The Red Bull High Performance Team led by Dr. Andy Walshe consists of a diverse cross-section of subject leaders in all fields relating to human optimization and performance. With the enlisted expertise of creativity researcher Mark Runco and ethnographer Lizbet Simmons, Andy and team partnered with Vibrant Data's Mappr Platform to create and launch Hacking Creativity, which has been three years in the making.  Vibrant Data's Mappr Platform blends computational statistics, machine learning, and network science to link people according to their similarities across all 20 dimensions, and identifies clusters of people that define distinct creative styles – or groups of creative habits that tend to go together.  The number of groups and their distinguishing characteristics emerge from the data.  This novel approach is providing the first-ever data-driven view of creative styles.

You can read more about Hacking Creativity at RedBull.com.

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SOURCE Red Bull High Performance Team

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