What’s the most essential skill for the rapidly changing, interdependent world? Creativity! Check this out and don’t put off your own creative development!
Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America’s GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, after bringing us breakthrough innovations like laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the mouse. And that was just from one company’s private R&D engine, Xerox’s PARC. At the same time, experts fret that our public school system doesn’t foster enough creativity in our future workforce. All of which makes it easy to worry that we’ll run out of creative leaders producing creative goods. But I think the decline is overwrought. And that’s because some of the best paths to encourage innovation are surprisingly simple.
Yes, as a society, we do need to remake our educational systems to deliver more young people to what Steve Jobs called “the intersection of technology and the humanities” — to bring American students’ globally below-average math and science fluency up to snuff and keep them immersed in the arts. But each of us as individuals can also work to optimize our innovative capacities. If innovation is stimulated by identifying underserved markets and then figuring out a service or product to fill the void, then here are a few low-to-no-cost suggestions for reinvigoration.
And to see the full article with tips on how to be more creative yourself, see “Creativity Lessons From Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs”.