According to Haydn Shaughnessy, a writer on the emerging economy, creativity has gone through several stages throughout history, including 1) an association with religion 2) romantic concept, 3) a discipline taught in art and architecture 4) as a method related to science and technology 5) as an expression of human potential. Interesting charts on page 2 of this article…
Creativity is important, more important now than ever, but what’s really interesting is that how we think about creativity changes over time. What creativity means to me and you today is different from what it meant twenty years ago or two hundred years ago. Same word, different experience. That matters too. We need to understand creativity before we can unlock our own potential.
And it matters to companies. In the book The Elastic Enterprise, Nick Vitalari and I point out that really strong companies have broken out of one part of the old industrial mold. We’re not arguing that these companies have moved to a post-industrial model – that argument has been made elsewhere and I think it’s on everyone’s agenda. We are identifying precisely what it means to do that.
For Haydn Shaughnessy’s full article, “How To Be Creative– What’s Changing And Why,” Click here.