The entire Knowinnovation team is together in Italy this week to celebrate the anniversary of Leonardo DaVinci’s birthday, on April 15th, which also happens to be the beginning of World Creativity and Innovation Week.
All our thinking and wondering about creativity and innovation is aided by the fact that we are gathered with other peers and colleagues and friends at the European Creativity Conference, otherwise known as CREA. Since 2003, the CREA conference has been a draw for people interested in exploring creativity and how to be more deliberate about it. CREA is a sister-conference to the Creative Problem Solving Institute, CPSI, the first ever creativity conference – it’s been an annual event for more than 55 years – sponsored by the Creative Education Foundation, the CEF.
What do you do at a creativity conference? You connect with like-minded people (curious about creativity) who have many different approaches (diverse perspectives) on how to use creative methods and techniques – or sometimes just your intuition – to be deliberately creative. We call this applied creativity.
World Creativity and Innovation Week has been happening since April of 2001, and is meant, according to co-founder Marci Segal, “to help people celebrate their capacity to use their creativity to make the world a better place, and to make their place in the world better, too.” There are events this week in Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Australia, Peru, Argentina…not to mention Italy.
The purpose of any of these conferences, events or week-long celebrations? To remind us that creativity isn’t necessarily something that just happens, and that we can be deliberate about how and when we are innovative by using processes and tools and techniques. It reminds us to pay attention and to innovate on purpose. What will you do to innovate this week?
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Know further: Watch How to Think like Leonardo DaVinci, by Michael Gelb, author of a book by the same title. Find out what events are lined up for World Creativity and Innovation Week. Experience deliberate Creativity by attending CPSI this June or CREA next April.
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Know even further (a post post-note): Learn more about CPSI by reading the reflections of other people who attend the conference: Amy Basic, Gregg Fraley, and Missy Carvin.