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For anyone attending Sydney's Luminous Festival curated by musician/producer Brian Eno, some lessons for researchers:

1. Develop a longer-term view for your body of work/research program: Eno's 40-year career demonstrates how creativity, foresight and role plularity may underpin a body of work or research program. Eno's career spans several phases: early Roxy Music, a solo career which popularised ambient music and generative art, and as a producer on breakthrough albums by David Bowie, David Byrne, Talking Heads, and U2 (sorry, Coldplay doesn't count). For most people, helming any one of the following projects would be enough: Talking Heads' Remain In Light (1980); U2's The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby (1991); or David Bowie's epochal 'Berlin trilogy' of Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979). Eno's hit rate and cultural influence suggests he has a greater embodied awareness. For an overview, see David Sheppard's recent biography On a Faraway Beach (Orion Books, London, 2008).

2. Develop a self-mastery of technique: As the creator of ambient music and generative art, Eno is frequently portrayed as a Renaissance-style creative mastermind with adaptive intent. Two more informed examples are Eric Tamm's PhD thesis and Elspeth McFadzean's study ('What We Can Learn From Creative People? The Story of Brian Eno', Management Science journal, 38:1, 2000, pp. 51-56). Eno's diary A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber & Faber, London, 1996) illustrates the emotional strength; attitude to funding, project and organisational constraints; and granularity of focus that a research program needs in the face of adversity.

3. Honour chance and luck: The 'Law of Accident' plays an aleatory, randomised role in many of Eno's most influential creations: the car accident which led to the ambient music experiments for Discreet Music (1975), the Frippertronics tape delay experiments which resulted in Eno and Robert Fripp's album No Pussyfooting (1972), and the oracular deck Oblique Strategies (1975) created with the late painter Peter Schmidt. This period shows the value of a disposition for action that is informed by conceptual depth; rapid, iterative development for strategy execution; and quasi-experimental methods with collaborators that fail fast and leverage upside risk. Eno continues this line of development with the art installation 77 Million Paintings (2006).

4. Build a network of collaborators and mentors: Eno's collaborators range from David Bowie, David Byrne and U2 to journeymen producers Daniel Lanois and Robert Fripp. This network enabled Eno to transition from Roxy Music to a solo career, and then as an in-demand producer (where word of mouth and past credits are the equivalent of academic publications and grants). As recounted in Simon Reynolds' history of New Wave innovation, Rip It Up And Start Again (Faber & Faber, London, 2005), Eno also became a mentor and subcultural curator in the late 1970s to New York's 'No Wave' scene and artists such as Devo and Talking Heads. Many of these artists and producers would become influential in their own right, rather than followers of an Eno aesthetic. Of course, sometimes things can go wrong: the rest of Talking Heads blamed Eno's production as one of the catalysts for vocalist David Byrne's decision to leave the band. More recently, Eno has leveraged his 'public intellectual' status to promote John Brockman's Edge salon and The Long Now Foundation.

Trent Reznor has released 404gb of raw, unedited HD tour footage from three shows on Nine Inch Nails' 2008 Lights In The Sky tour.  The footage is available as a peer-to-peer BitTorrent file.

An interesting pattern emerges about the reasons for Reznor's BitTorrent tactics and Christmas gifts to fans.  Several weeks ago Reznor indicated to fans that an official DVD project for the tour had fallen through after a negotiation breakdown with a production company.  Whilst researching this 2008 conference paper and presentation I found out that Reznor knew in December 2006 about the Pirate Bay leak of NIN's unreleased Closure DVD (Halo 12), a project still held up by licensing negotiations.

As I suggested in the paper, Reznor is using BitTorrent hyperdistribution to side-step negotiation breakdowns.  You can visualise the backward induction of decision tree payoffs or the real options analysis.  It's a win-win situation for Reznor and NIN's fans: Reznor breaks the deadlock and releases 'unreleasable' projects which probably have significant, unrecoverable sunk costs.  Fans get the raw, unedited material for user-generated content.  Behind this strategic rationale is a positive feedback loop that keeps NIN and Reznor relevant, generates buzz marketing and media coverage, and enhances Reznor's bargaining power in negotiations.  The losers in this reshaped value net are the traditional record companies, their retail distributors and music industry lawyers.

Why does Hollywood's upcoming production slate have so many remakes of classic science fiction, horror and fantasy films?  Depending on your viewpoint, several reasons.

The Writer's Guild of America's 2008 strike affected the 'deal flow' of new scripts that Hollywood's studios may have purchased and fast-tracked out of development hell and into pre-production.  In the language of managerial economics the studios lacked the willingness to pay (WTP) the willingness to sell (WTS) price demanded by WGA members for their services.  Faced with months of industrial action the studios pursued a fallback option: remakes of existing properties.

WGA's delay tactics have given the studios a potential financial windfall in the near-term future.  The studios often already own the intellectual property rights for the remakes.  Demographics such as inter-generational shifts creates two consumer segments: people who remember the original films, and Gen X and Gen-Y viewers who are new.  Ancillary markets can be tapped, from cable television re-runs of the original films to DVD repackages/re-releases, 'versioned' editions for collectors, and 'bundled' packs of both films.  The studios' windfall is a short-term boost in cashflow which can be used for working capital management or debt-equity leverage.  New Zealand's Weta Digital also benefits as the films require its expertise in digital special effects; the studios can minimise their production costs through currency hedging and business process outsourcing.

The global financial crisis also benefits the studios through a market timing strategy for film portfolio management.  The production slate announced so far for 2009-2010 is heavily weighted towards dystopian science fiction films from the turbulent late 1960s and the energy crisis/stagflation early 1970s.  There's also a few 1930s Depression era monster films and 1950s Cold War science fiction.  American journalist Annalee Newitz, amongst others, has observed that Hollywood studios turn to genre films during times of social dislocation; this thesis is central to 1950s film noir and its neo-noir remanifestation in the early 1990s recession, and may also fit the micro-trend of counterterrorism films in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Cinema Studies scholar Geoff Mayer has also explored this thesis in Pre-Code Hollywood cinema and the Western genre.

However, there's another potential pattern here that might be worth further research, even though correlation is not causation.  The 1930s Depression era films appear to fit the 54-to-70 year long macroeconomic cycle (aka the KWave) that Soviet mathematician Nikolai Kondratieff proposed, particularly the Fall and Winter periods of stagnation and recession/depression.  The time period between the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s films also roughly fits the 18-year Kuznets Wave identified by Simon Kuznets, and which might explain the deeper/unconscious interest in 1970s film properties.  Add a mid-1990s wave of films (perhaps neo-noir or the heroin chic of My Own Private Idaho and Trainspotting), and you have a series of macreconomic cycles that span film genres, subcultural imagery, inter-generational audiences and new cohorts of film actors, directors, scriptwriters and producers.

It may be a neat backtesting/retrospective explanation of how Hollywood studios can revitalise their institutional power.  Or, it just may be the theoretical framework for the Entourage crew to shed their up-and-coming careers and achieve some real deal-making longevity.