Fostering Creativity in the New Millennium

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Better education, an encouraging environment, natural leadership, and multidisciplinary teamwork will be paramount. The conditions under which a society can enhance its creativity-and therefore its innovative capability-will be key to succeeding in the next century. The most powerful tools to stimulate a creative society include creative education, an encouraging environment, natural leadership, and multidisciplinary teamwork. My intention here is not to make predictions about future technological eras, but to identify some of the critical paradigms that will affect our lives beyond 2000, and to suggest some changes that could help to foster a creative society ready to meet the technological challenges of the future. The world is experiencing unprecedented change in many areas, not only science and technology but also in our societal, cultural, and environmental paradigms. The rate at which critical discoveries are made, the dramatic decrease in the time it takes for knowledge in a particular field to double, changes in the value components of products, and the rapid growth of communication are having a profound effect upon technology development. While these changes alter the way we comprehend our world, so far they have been incremental in nature. People have mostly been able to adjust and cope with them simply by increasing their efforts to learn (e.g., using such conventional techniques as speed-reading, mega-memorizing), electronic learning, and information management (1,2). In the future, however, such changes within will be continuous rather than incremental. As a result, society's conversion to, and adoption of, change will require non-traditional approaches to secure and maintain the rate of change. These new approaches will further spur change and can be expected to ignite an explosion in innovation. Thus, the new century has the potential to experience a significantly more dramatic rate of critical discoveries than the 20th century, just as that century dramatically outpaced the record of 19th century achievements (Figure 1 ). Creativity Education Because today's advanced nations depend heavily upon novel technologies, it will be important to develop an encouraging environment that will allow society's creative minds to flourish. Some professional societies already have recognized this; they have established special programs to support education for the 21 st century (3) and are predicting the transformation of formal education (4). Educational programs geared toward developing creativity should start as early as kindergarten. Young minds should be exposed to creativity classes (similar to today's creative writing classes) to foster innovative thinking. This is a must for tomorrow. Education should also include experiences that involve application of multidisciplinary knowledge, even at the early educational levels, and this should continue throughout the entire educational process and into the workplace. For instance, in engineering, manufacturing experience should be obligatory. Although conventional wisdom has always held that creativity is the purview of the young, more recently that notion has come into question as innovation emerges from every age group. In fact, the creative mind knows no age limit, although creativity is best developed early. In many companies, the same people are recognized over and over for their innovations, just as the Edisons and Ketterings of the past were known for lifelong inventiveness. This was not a coincidence. These individuals were open to new knowledge that would stimulate their minds-they were curious about everything. Innovative people might not have a possible solution in mind when they go in search of an innovation, but they have an approach to how to look for a solution. Inventors like Edison and Kettering learned early how to approach problems creatively and draw on their experience to convert creativity into innovation. …