Unlocking the Power of Creative Energy With Dropbox

Productivity is good—but it’s not why we work. It’s not what gets us out of bed in the morning. It’s not what drives us to try something exciting, to make something new, something we love, something that lasts.

Creative energy is the spark that keeps us going long after office hours are over. The more energy you have for the work you love, the more energy you have to share with your team, and the more energy you ultimately get back in return. It’s not just powerful, it’s renewable. And it’s inside every member of your team.

At Dropbox, we want to help creative problem solvers tap into their team’s energy and keep it flowing. Instead of talking about “productivity” and “doing more”, we want to create open, collaborative environments that embrace transparency and help teams find a new — and better — way forward. Not only are we committed to creating a culture of transparency at Dropbox, but we see evidence of it’s value in the work of our customers, who serve as inspiration to us everyday.

Empowering energy at World Bicycle Relief

One such example is that of World Bicycle Relief. When F.K. Day and Leah Missbach Day saw the devastating impact of the Indian Ocean tsunami, they felt called to help. But they wanted to do more than just send money. After learning that bicycles were one of the best tools for helping survivors mobilize, F.K. decided to leverage his expertise as a co-founder of the SRAM corporation to make a bigger impact. So he and Leah founded World Bicycle Relief to help the people who had been relocated from their homes, schools, and places of work to get moving again.

After distributing over 20,000 bikes to the people of Sri Lanka, WBR learned that the same number of people who died in the tsunami die every two weeks in Africa from hunger and preventable disease. ”You can’t walk away from a statement like that,” said F.K. “So we decided to scale up in Africa.” Using Dropbox to keep their supply chain moving, WBR has now distributed over 350,000 bicycles to the field. By providing access to critical resources, they continue their mission to mobilize the developing world one bicycle at a time.

“I look at the creative energy of good, passionate people working together in harmony,” observes F.K. “It’s an unstoppable force.”

Tapping into otherworldly energy with Future Wife

Collaboration is also core to the work of artist Beau Burrows, co-founder of design collective Future Wife, who wants to teleport people to other worlds. Using Dropbox to collaborate and run the engineering of his installations, he invents interactive experiential installations that are tactile, escapist, and completely immersive. He’s worked with other tech-driven artists like Dave and Gabe, and created installations for everyone from Skrillex to Absolut.

Beau says he uses nature to influence his work, both directly and subconsciously. “In the same way that life has evolved in interactive processes of organisms, I think that it’s important for my work to overlap and never be finished so that a past iteration of a certain piece might turn into a new piece. That parallels evolution, but it also just feels like a more natural way to work.”

Powering creative energy through transparency

On Wednesday at 3:30 pm, we’ll be hosting a session, ‘Transparent Teams: Driving Alignment Through an Open Creative Process,’ to explore how open collaboration powers creative energy. During the session, we’ll draw from our own experience creating a culture of transparency at Dropbox as well as share insights gathered from our customer community. Register today to join us for what will be a lively — and transparent — discussion.