A friend of mine is big on creativity. In fact, he's a visiting professor at De Montfort University's Institute of Creative Technologies. He also runs a company that gets paid for coming up with bright ideas.
He has the most brilliant and clearly articulated approach to harnessing creativity profitably, which I'd like to spill the beans on, but can't. Not yet, anyway. At school he was a nightmare because of the way his mind worked. He fluctuated between total hopelessness and utter brilliance.
Sometimes his brilliance was misplaced but, as his subsequent life has shown, he has learned to corral his creativity and put it to good use.
Through his teaching, he is helping future generations harness their creativity. He knows this is what makes the difference between success and failure in today's frantic world.
Continuous innovation is demanded and this can no longer be the exclusive preserve of company founders or a coterie of engineers/inventors/whatever. We're all in this together and facilitating creativity seems to be right up the information professional's street.
The problem, as Jim Magee pointed out recently, is that to be creative, you have to be curious. And curiosity doesn't sit well with the suits that run organisations. I think they fear that if everyone followed their curious instincts, no work would get done.
Creativity rarely comes out of thin air, it usually comes from fresh juxtapositions of existing information. When I invented some software a long time ago (it sold tens of thousands of copies), it was the result of combining elements of Tony Buzan's mind-mapping, IBM's Bill of Materials Processing, Ted Nelson's information on Actor Languages and Vannevar Bush's paper "As We May Think".
Each of us has a different mix of information and experience, so the potential for fresh juxtapositions is limitless. The trick is to ensure that an environment is established where it's okay to dream and definitely okay to share and where curiosity and creativity are a continuous backdrop to real life.
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