Creativity in the Workforce

Important Words on Creativity . . .

"Creativity will provide the discoveries, inventions, innovations, and improvements that will fuel global economic growth. Creativity will be needed by us to overcome the national economic problems that we find ourselves in, to face ever increasing worldwide competition, and to meet the challenge of a time of rapid innovation. We must become students of the future so that we may plan to meet these challenges. We must be sensitive to the present so that we may be able to detect those factors that will have a bearing on our future. And we must be willing to change; to move our interests to that which gives us the highest return for our investment, keeping in mind at all times the broadest definition of ourselves."

"This is imperative in a time of change for it is only within broad concepts that we can adapt to change. Von Fange wrote in Professional Creativity, 'to make creative contributions, as Einstein indicated, requires that one always search for what is fundamental. Or, to phrase it another way, if buggy-whip people had realized that they were not in the business of making high quality buggy whips, but rather in the business, fundamentally, of stimulating further output from the prime mover of the family conveyance, their factories would not now be gaunt skeletons upon the American industrial scene.' History is full of examples of companies and industries, which did not react to change. No stage coach company became a railroad company. No buggy producer succeeded in the auto business. No railroad or bus company entered the airline business."

"Creativity seems to be inherent in our nature. We are created creative. We lose some of our creative talents as we age due to the boundaries that society puts around us or that we put around ourselves. To be creative sometimes requires that we breakdown these boundaries. Anyone can be creative. To profess that you cannot create is to set a goal you will certainly achieve. Creativity is elemental to all change whether it be discovery, invention, innovation, or improvement."

Source: The Innovation Road Map Travelogue, Observations on the journey to innovation.
Saturday, August 28, 2004, Creativity and the Future. Retrieved 4/28/08 from http://www.theinnovationroadmap.com/Travelogue/2004_08_01_archive.html