In the past week or so, I’ve seen a couple of interesting articles on the topic of creativity in the Huffington Post. What caught my attention more than anything wasn’t just the focus on creativity in a popular source, but that these articles place a fairly trans-disciplinary emphasis on the subject. This focus didn’t necessarily get down to the specific level of trans-disciplinary thinking skills (like observation, abstraction, etc), but signaled a broader view of creativity that crosses disciplinary boundaries. Most notably, both articles suggested something very much in line with the creativity framework I focus on — that people with more widely varied interests (whether in hobbies, skills, subject matters, intellectual interests, etc) tend to be better at innovative thinking.
The first piece I noticed last week, “Does Business Need the Arts to be Innovative? Five Executives Weigh In“, by Elysabeth Alfano, discusses the way that the most successful and innovative businesses have fostered creativity, by widening the scope of their employees experiences overall, and exposure to the arts in particular. The whole piece has some excellent quotes from successful business leaders and innovative entrepreneurs, which speak to the power of creativity — even in fields like finance or business, which we don’t typically think of as having a creative bend to them. For example, Mark Tebbe, co-founder and former vice chairman of Answers.com, current tech columnist for “The Daily Splash” for the Chicago Sun Times and Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business…(i.e. guy who’s knowledgeable about successful business), Read more…