Creative Leadership : Featured Stories

"I basically took what was happening in the Twin Cities creatively and made my own resume," says Kate Iverson, a triple- or quadruple-threat art promoter, gallerist, and online journalist who lives at the hyperspeedily evolving interface of art, design, and social-media communication. We could think of no better person to fill us in on where those worlds meet in our towns, and to let us in on some of her favorite trendsters and Twitterers.

Here's an update on 4Front, the ambitious project initiated by local adman/marketer John Foley to make the Twin Cities a world-class innovation hub by calling international attention to our achievements and persuading top creative talent from around the world to come here to work and live. The means? Annual awards in four major areas of innovation, and a world's-fair-like showcase. Foley and a stellar board of directors are working on funding, planning a fall kickoff event, and mulling a new way to connect prizewinners with the community.

When the Great Recession swept in, it took a toll on development--including the building of new housing for the homeless. But now, along with other signs of life in the economy, local developers in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors are back on the job in a highly visible way, rehabbing major buildings and creating "support housing" within them--places to live that also offer services that help keep people off the streets.

Lars Leafblad, a principal in the Minneapolis executive search firm KeyStone Search, was dubbed "the most networked man in the Twin Cities" by Minnesota Business magazine last year. In the second of our Big Picture conversations about the future of our city and state, Leafblad acknowledges that we're good at cooperation and connection--but adds that we need a compelling new image of what we want to be and where we want to go.

The Twin Cities design community wields not just national, but international influence. The U of M is developing alliances between its design college and some unlikely partners as design expands from crafting objects to organizing human experience. The economic meltdown, the Katrina aftermath, and the BP oil spill could have been avoided if those in charge had thought like designers. These are some of the insights from Tom Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design, in the first of our "Big Picture" interviews.

Our Resident Tourist takes a tour of a boxcar-shaped building on the Minneapolis riverfront where, even in winter, scientists use inflowing water from the Mississippi to model all kinds of interactions between land and water. Scientific esoterica? Not really. The scientists at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory want to help Louisiana rebuild its delta. They want to understand the algae blooms that create fish-killing "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico. And with new federal support, they're turning their expertise toward the study of wind power, biofuels, and "hydrokinetics"--nothing less than the discovery of "new ways to power our civilization."

The commons is a concept that you may be hearing a lot more about in the coming months and years. According to urbanist and journalist Jay Walljasper, who's just published a new book on the subject, the commons is everything we share--from public parks to ideas, urban gathering spaces to the internet, jokes and games to the oceans. And "commons-based solutions" to our political and social problems look past the I-me-mine of the privatized perspective toward the common good, in everything from small neighborhood improvements to social policy. Walljasper sees commons-based thinking as a way past many of our current left-right dilemmas--and he thinks the Twin Cities have a head start in that direction.

Plenty of companies in the Twin Cities and around the country want to do good as well as make a buck. In order to make that easier in a time of shrinking resources, new forms of corporate structure are evolving, including the L3C--the low-profit limited liability company. At least one Twin Cities company has opted for that new status, and others are looking into it and other ways to combine the best of the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. But there are those who wonder of  these highly experimental new structures are anything more than good PR.