Humantific CoFounder Elizabeth Pastor will give a talk on Accelerating Innovation at the upcoming Innovation Forum being organized by our friends at In/situm on July 2nd in Mexico City.
Monthly Archive for June, 2009
Humantific CoFounder GK VanPatter will give a keynote talk on SenseMaking for ChangeMaking at the 2009 IDSA International Conference upcoming in Miami on September 23-26.
About the conference:
“Our global economy is going through dramatic change. Design can be proactive and guide change. We can be a significant influence in creating new value. It has been said that the future is not something that happens…it is something that you make happen. Business is not asking for our help to drive new value, they are demanding it. In the 30s, design helped the economy out of the depression. We are finding ourselves at a moment of opportunity once again. Designers have the tools to create new value for reviving economies.
Project Infusion is a new format for IDSA’s International Conference, which will be held at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel September 23-26. Both domestic and international attendees across diverse disciplines beyond the confines of the IDSA membership are invited to exchange ideas, opinions and insights. This is a project that we will contribute to mutually. We will enjoy its fruits together.
Fresh infusion of inspiration, knowledge and wisdom will fuel our creativity. This will be the process of steeping and soaking substance in order to extract new viewpoints. It will be an exchange of ideas that you will want to bring your boss to, or send your employees to. You will learn how to increase your bottom line and that of your business.”
See more on the conference site.
Humantific CoFounder GK VanPatter will give a keynote talk on SenseMaking for ChangeMaking at the Creative Economy and Beyond Conference upcoming in Helsinki on September 9-10 as part of Helsinki Design Week.
About the conference:
“Creative Economy and Beyond is an international conference examining the role of creativity in the economy and society. The world is changing at an ever-fastening pace. A shift from an industrial to a knowledge and experience society creates constant demands for renewal to all sectors of society.
Around the world, creativity and innovation are called upon as saviours of the future. Facing economic crisis strengthens the need to create and innovate faster and more effectively than ever before.
The quest for a better future is not about simple answers or single truths. It is about multiple truths and accepting the never ending quest for better questions.”
The themes are:
• Creativity in Business and Leadership
• Creative Regimes: Immaterial Business, Future Law, and the User of Tomorrow
• Designing our Future: Education, Research and Innovation Policy
See more on the conference site:
See more on the Helsinki Design Week Events here.
In 1952, Alex Osborn wrote: “Exercise your imagination — the more creative you become, the more you will get out of life.”
With so much hype around innovation and creativity today, we find it useful to be aware at a deeper level of the history of innovation, applied creativity, creative problem solving and design thinking. There are many overlaps in the history that are quite amazing in retrospect.
Pictured here is a gem from the Humantific Innovation Archives collection. This terrific little booklet by Alex Osborn entitled The Power of Your Mind was published an astonishing 57 years ago in conjunction with his book Wake Up Your Mind also published in 1952.
In the historical publications one can see early acknowledgement of numerous challenges that many organizations and societies still grapple with today.
Like time capsules, the early publications on the subject of applied creativity reveal the optimism of the post-world war two era, a focus on encouraging imagination and the application of creativity in an American business context.
It’s not difficult to see that as early as the 1940’s thought leaders were trying to make the case that American business schools and schools in general get more serious about teaching and encouraging imagination and creative thinking. Evidently many educational institutions including the business schools did not listen to that message for a very long time.
Also revealed in the historical creative problem solving materials are the societal stereotypes of that era. In the early publications women were often depicted as housewives engaged in creative domestic work while men were often depicted as business oriented workers not making effective use of their imaginations.
“Many housewives work their imaginations more than their husbands do.”
Apart from the stereotypes that now seem comical, what is interesting to see is the view into a simpler world, the emphasis on idea finding in the context of product objects, and orientation towards engineering or science. Also fascinating to see is how little some of the problems around changing behaviors in the direction of innovation have changed since Alex Osborn, Sidney Parnes and others began writing about the subject decades ago.
Today organizational leaders face a vastly more complicated world in a state of constant change. Those engaged today in driving organizational change or innovation enabling understand that many organizations have built judgment dominated cultures and simultaneously wonder why no innovation is occurring. How to create more balanced, more innovative cultures remains among the top ten most encountered organizational business challenges even today:
Here is a small sample of Alex Osborn’s 1952 commentary on the subject:
“The thinking mind finds it easier to judge than to create. Nearly all of our education tends to develop our critical faculty. And our experience likewise builds up our judgment…The more we exercise our judgment, the less likely we are to exercise our imagination. By overuse of our judicial power we may even cramp our creative power.”
“Loss of imagination can be even more deplorable than loss of musculation… We can get along with less brawn in our later years but to surmount the obstacles which age piles in our paths we need more than seasoned judgment, we need well trained imagination.”
“When it comes to business, ideas are almost everything. Their value can often exceed that of any asset on any financial statement.”
Also in the early 1950 era materials one can see concern expressed that America was losing its creative edge, perhaps a timeless topic!
“There are many signs that Yankee ingenuity is on the wane — not because we are born with less creative talent, but because we no longer try hard enough to use the talent that is in us… Our softer living numbs our sense of enterprise and deadens our creative spirit.”
With the internet now enabling global interaction and with it built-in judgment functionality, we are interested in how present day and emerging technologies might serve to repair, balance and address several deeply rooted human innovation challenges that have existed for generations.
Being aware of the history of education and innovation helps us and our client partners think about such issues in a context beyond the flavor trend of the moment.
See also: How to Think Up!
