I just stumbled on a fascinating essay about creativity in schools. It could have been written yesterday! Read to the end to find out who the famous author is, and what year it was written: How can we keep creativity alive in children? Creative children are likely to be unusual children. They get bored with the… Read More Keep Creativity Alive in Children
I spent a stimulating and exhausting week at the South-by-Southwest EDU conference in Austin, TX. It’s the premier event for new and innovative education products. I saw so many fascinating presentations, and everyone I met was super-interesting. I’ll try to capture my experience with just two events. The first was the SXSW Playground–a big convention center ballroom, filled… Read More SXSWedu 2017 was Awesome!
In my 2007 book Group Genius, I predicted that the organization of the future would drive innovation with collaboration. In the ten years since, this prediction has largely come true. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal described how several big companies have shifted to a more collaborative, more innovative organizational structure–enabled by collaborative software that didn’t… Read More Collaborative Technology Leads to Collaborative Leadership
The ZIG ZAG path to greater creativity… Read More The Path to Creativity
I just delivered the keynote address “Educating for Innovation” at this big event in Calgary, with teachers, school leaders, education professors, and policy types: After the keynote, I did a breakout session where I shared my research on how art school professors teach. Then, I asked the audience to work in small groups to apply these practices… Read More Sawyer keynote at IDEAS conference in Calgary, Canada
One of the oldest tests for creativity is the “brick test.” It originated in the 1950s, and it’s pretty simple: Take five minutes, and write down as many uses as you can think of for a brick. It’s called a divergent thinking test, which means it measures your ability to generate lots of ideas. And, you… Read More The Brick Test: The Most Unusual Use EVER
A provocative claim: in any country, immigrants are statistically more likely to generate exceptionally creative works. There’s a long list of immigrant geniuses: Victor Hugo, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein. But single cases don’t make a scientific argument. Do we have any statistical data on this? Eric… Read More Are Immigrants More Creative?
Creativity researchers have shown that serendipity plays a big role in creativity, and that serendipity is more likely to happen when you seek out new experiences and become more aware of what’s going on around you. My 2013 book ZIG ZAG is filled with creativity advice based on this research. One of my chapters is called “LOOK: How… Read More Inventology: a new book by Pagan Kennedy
December 15, 2015 I’m excited to announce the release of the ZIG ZAG Creativity Cards! The card deck has 48 cards, and each one has a different creativity exercise. There are also four cards that describe how to use the cards alone, in groups, and when you’re facilitating a workshop. The cards are perfect for everyday use. You… Read More ZIG ZAG Creativity Cards Now Available!
I’m excited to be on this new list of top innovation books, at http://www.medium.com: Explaining Creativity by Keith Sawyer If innovation were a religion, then creativity would be its clergy and this textbook, which collects all the latest scientific research on the topic, its bible. Sawyer does a masterful job of dispelling many myths surrounding… Read More Top Books on Innovation
The Creativity Guru 