Beyond Creativity

Time (Management) and Creativity

I find it difficult to teach or consult creative thinking skills without discussing about time and how people use it.

My recommendations:

• Bodil Jönsson (please, see my book list) sees Western people as 'slaves' of digital time. So, please, consider throwing away your wrist watch and sleep long without alarm clocks ;-)   

• Average citizen in the US watches 4 hours of TV every day!  We Europeans are very close to it. How about keeping your tellytime in minimum and focus on books, conversations with your family and friends and taking exercise ;-)

• As a (former) mobile learning and mobility researcher, I agree with Perry and friends (2002) that there is still a lot of 'access anytime, anyplace and anywhere' hype around. Do you really need to be available all the time? Get a mobile phone that enables you to switch off the GSM/GPRS/WLAN part (like Ericsson P910, Nokia Communicator 9300/9500 or Palm Treo). It may even be a healthy choice for your tissues ;-)     

• Elisabeth Churchill [Hi! We met in C&T 2003 :-) ] and Nina Wakeford (2002) have observed that “Experience of mobility is embedded in an experience of temporality which includes mutually negotiated rhythms of contact, availability and accessibility”. Please, tell and indicate your  rhythm to your colleagues. Tell them when you are available and how do  you wish to be contacted. Creating new things requires often solitude.

• According to psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie (1958) creativity has its roots, not in the unconcious, but in the 'preconcious system' flowing between the concious and unconcious. This is the state we experience between sleep and wakefulness or during daydreams.  How about trying a technique to maximise this state? Try meditation, NLP or related. Or just try to read and make notes while laying down.    
  

• Sauna can be a device for time management! We Finns have utilised it for thousands of years. In wintertime I highly recommend outdoor winter swimming (Avantouinti). Pure Awareness! (Crazy Finns, you will propably say :-)

• When thinking about enhancing work groups' creativity, see the Harvard Business Review August 2002 article by Teresa Amabile, Constance Hadley and Steven Cramer. Nice time management suggestions for team leaders!

The above mentioned topics may be sometimes unrealistic. I realise it in my everyday life as a father with limited time management skills :-)

You have a time (management) tip related to creativity? Please, add a comment and let us know!

Technologies facilitating creativity

There is a small nerd or a techie living inside of everyone of us ;-) First I thought that using technology to enhance creativity is inhuman. Then I started to think about artistic expression, some technologies and their unique combinations enabling creativity. Two years ago I had a chance to try out immersive free-hand drawing in 3-D space in HUT VR Lab with the guidance of artist, researcher Wille Mäkelä. (See Wille's related ACM-article ) . This experience taught me that certain artefacts and products of creativity can only be created with the help of technology. Additionally, working in 3-D space was such an immersive experience that it changed my perception of drawing and painting. Since that, I have been interested how technology can enhance our creative ability and what role artificial intelligence (AI) could play. AI's promise is still to come, Lego-Logo and Seymour Papert's vision has not been fully realised ;-)

Roger Schank (1988) points out that creativity consists of two subprocesses:

1. Search process, looking among previously experienced explanation patterns.
2. Alteration process, modifying an explanation derived from one situation to be used in another.

If I look at the subprocess 1, Internet search engines and new personalised search agents (see SearchEngineWatch) look quite promising to me with simplified UIs (like Soople ). With these search tools it is quite easy to find out what is publicly known about the topic and whether my own approach is unique. Sometimes the ability to visualise things and see their connections is even more valuable. Therefore, I am currently excited about mindmap tools that could help me visualise large data masses like blogosphere (Mindmanager X5 and open source variants WikkaWiki  linked to FreeMind .

The subprocess 2 mentioned by Schank requires rules and explanation patterns utilisation in the AI solutions. In my mind, the individual and community can handle this alteration work better than computers. However, certain question sets and digital forms in mobile applications may help the user explain and structure the ideas from distant worlds to the the community. I am trying to build these question sets in my ongoing research work and simultaneously think what how brokering (like the Technology Brokering Model from Andrew Hargadon and Robert Sutton (1997)) could be better utilised in the creation of innovations.

More to come about brokering...

Creative Problem-Solving versus Problem-Based Learning

Problem-Solving is harder than I thought. I have lately reviewed different Creative Problem-Solving (CPS) processes. Starting from Dewey and Wallas (1926):

• Preparation
• Incubation
• Inspiration
• Verification.

To:

Osborn&Barnes (1972 ):

• Fact finding
• Problem Finding
• Idea Finding
• Solution Finding
• Acceptance Finding.

I have made this CPS review to model tools for my software prototype.

One thing bothers me: What is the relationship of CPS and Problem-Based Learning (PBL)? It seems to me that PBL-movement has started in 50's in Case Western University and applied it's methodologies to Harvard Medical School. Only Dewey is mentioned in both disciplines. Still, I have not yet found any integrating article on CPS-PBL. Any insights?

I have also looked writings of Scardamalia&Bereiter and Rogers about Experiential Learning. Still no link to CPS. Or have I missed something? I am lost (temporarily) ;-)

Creativity and Innovation - The Missing Link

I really do not have the complete answer here. But, I give a try ;-)

To my mind, both creativity and innovation terms have been used a bit too loosely in the public discussion. I prefer the view of J. Daniel Couger (1995 ) who saw creativity much broader concept than innovation. Innovation is the more restricted process of turning an idea into a product or service. He further sees that creativity is involved from the birth of an idea to the maturation in practical use.

This Couger's view of creativity is much broader than a very commonly used, Heap's (1989)  rather narrow definition of creativity: "Creativity is the synthesis of new ideas and concepts by the radical restructuring and re-association of existing ones’ , whereas innovation is the implementation of the results of creativity’’. The best definition I have found for innovation is from Amabile: "Innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas in any domain". Still, this definition associates creativity only to ideas and idea generation phases.

To understand all views and definitions of creativity, I like the viewpoint of Mel Rhodes (1961) when he defined  4 Ps of creativity: Person, Process, Product and Press (Environment). Originally Rhodes could not figure out one single definition for creativity, that is why he introduces these 4 dimensions and took a look at environment. But it takes a lot of effort to go through all these Ps and related literature (I am working on it...)

Why creativity and innovation have been so distant from each other in the innovation literature? While organisational sciences have focused on innovation (process and product) research, humanistic sciences have focused on creativity research (person and environment). Even in daily life, engineers may get buzzled an educator starts talking about creativity. This strange dualism has been noted by organisational creativity researchers. According to Cameron Ford (1995) ”Researchers studying the one topic have been only peripherally aware of the work done by those studying the other topic. As a result, creativity researchers and innovation researchers have failed to capitalize on potential synergies”. This comment  has made me focus on creativity in my own research and start related teaching&consulting.

Rodney McAdam (2004) sees a need to integrate knowledge creation research with idea generation research.  He also creates a taxonomy of knowledge creation including distributed cognition and social constructionism. Earlier he and John McClelland (2002) made a quite nice overview of 'Individual and teambased idea generation within innovation management' in the European Journal of Innovation Management. And managed to bridge these remote worlds. The next step is perhaps to bring creativity to knowledge management & Innovation research and conferences in larger extent? There is already going on discussion in KM community about managing and leading creativity and creative people (see for examples writings of Mumford).

Creativity is associated with intuitiveness and innovation is associated with rationality. As Einstein put it: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." . For this reason, it may still be difficult to rationalise creativity to fit in organisational innovation processes. Let's see :-)      

On Air - Topics and Rhythm of Mikko's Blog

Hello Folks!

This blog will be related to my ongoing computer science PhD work, titled:
"Building an Information System that Facilitates Learning and Problem-Solving Processes to Support Creativity"

Within coming weeks I will write about creativity research, innovation research and learning research.

Please, try to tolerate also my non-scientific, even absurd views about life, flow, golf, time, awareness, nature and more ;-)

I assume that the interval between my blog messages will be something like a week.

Stay tuned :-)

Mikko