The Top 5 Ideas From TED Fellows

I spent this morning watching the TED Fellows talk about their work -- a group that included clean tech entrepreneurs, scientists, musicians, artists and more. All are, as TED Fellow founder and TED Community Manager Tom Rielly put it, polymaths who excel in far more than just their particular area of expertise.

Although I loved all of their presentations, five ideas stood out to me in particular as game-changing, mind-bending or generally vital.

1. The power of local value chains: Kickstarter founder Perry Chen talked about his company's model of giving artists and creators the power to harness their audiences for financial support. While I've been a fan of the company for awhile, I was incredibly impressed by the clarity with which Perry explained Kickstarter's fundraising principles -- particularly Kickstarter's efforts to create local value economies that care about things that larger exchanges and markets would easily bypass. As Perry explained, supporters of most Kickstarter projects derive their "return" from the act of co-creating whatever the project is. It's a reminder about the importance of rethinking "rules," especially when the conditions that create those rules have changed.

2. For the green economy, consumer desires are key. Just ask 20-year-old inventor Ben Pass Gulak. We all know our society needs electric vehicles, but as he says, the designs offered so far are -- "there's just no other way to say this...fuckin' ugly!" He's trying to change that with "Uno," a one-wheeled self-balancing, all-electric vehicle that looks like Batman invented it. Green entrepreneurs have to understand the power of design, sexiness, attraction and status if they ever hope to capture enough consumer demand to reach a tipping point.

3. Reimagining goals: Kellee Santiago designs video games that don't play by others' rules. Instead of creating environments focused on calculated amounts of destruction or killing, thatgamecompany has put out titles like "Flower," which actually turn gaming into a relaxing experience. Meanwhile, surrealist documentarian Anita Doron requested that her audience relinquish their fixed ideas of the world in order to re-experience it. Overall, the underlying message of both talks helped conference-goers recall the need to re-imagine the goals that define and constrain us.

4. Creativity inspired by constraint: Israeli artist Raffael Lomas focuses on discovering creativity within specific constraints. For years, he has sculpted using only the wheel as his base. He neither adds nor subtracts material, but only reshapes and remakes what he has. His discovery of infinite possibilities in spite of those constraints led him to begin leading artistic workshops for the blind. I think Twitter is another example of the creativity that's inspired when you introduce constraints. It's a lesson for all social entrepreneurs: any barrier can become a piece of the puzzle.

5. Rethinking everything from the ground up: One of the closing presentations was from the incredibly big-thinking Mitchell Joaquim. As an architect and city planner, Mitchell reimagines entire landscapes, with the goal of designing from entirely different starting points. For example, one of his company's early projects involves putting the entire apparatus of a vehicle into the wheel itself, making it so that you can create a vehicle out of anything that you can add a wheel to. This has allowed for a wholesale rethinking of the car, and his company is now beginning to test a city-focused vehicle that could fold for easy use -- like a shopping cart -- saving space and energy in the process. The implication is right out of Lawrence of Arabia -- if "Nothing is Written," then we get to write the future.

Photo Credit: TEDConferences