Whether investing in such deliberate creativity or evaluating naturally occurring ideas, the key issue is whether they are relevant "AHA!"s, with the potential to reveal alternatives likely to provide a true advantage.
We at The Co-Creativity Institute are proposing that the ways we think about and describe creativity and innovation can severely limit potential. Here we are going to discuss a variety of perspectives that we feel can work together synergistically to dramatically improve the returns that individuals and organizations can get from their investment in creativity and/or innovation. Some of these perspectives are on theoretical approaches to the issues, others suggest different way to look at commonly used systems and methods.
Some of you already active in deliberate creativity and innovation, some of you may already have had the same "AHA's!" and may have found them useful.
Let us offer a brief listing of some of the key perspectives we suggest, and will be discussing in more detail:
- The creative event is insight, not ideas. Insights are shifts in our perspective which make new and better ideas obvious, and even reveal the potential of "old" ideas.
- Creativity changes the creator. Once we have and adopt a new perspective, we are different and approach the world differently.
- Individuals, groups, teams, organizations, and even cultures can be described as holding perspectives which can be changed, So we can define creativity for each.
- We judge the strength and value of an "AHA!" by our knowledge. So its value is limited to the fit of our knowledge to the real situation.
- Co-creativity is the acknowledgement that all creativity is a synergistic merging of ideas and insights from all over. In a sense, automobile designers are co-creating with the cave dwellers who figured out the wheel. Since most innovations utilize materials and ideas from others, we are cocreating with their inventors. There is greater potential when we actually interact directly with them and they create what fits us and we create to fit them.
