IN THIS ISSUE:

• Letter From Sarah
• Feature Article - The Creativity Revolution - Igniting Innovation
• Out of the Box
• Events and Resources
• The Edison Awards
• About Sarah Caldicott

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Dear Innovator:

Do you believe that everyone is creative? If you do, you're in the minority. Why? Research shows most of us believe "other people" are WAY more creative than we are. For a majority of us, Creativity is perceived to be a force which operates beyond our grasp. It lies out there in the mists, in some foggy gray territory no one can name.

Edison would disagree with this 100%! He believed everyone is born innately creative...born with all the talents needed to be creative throughout an entire lifetime. The challenge in his view rested on how best to UNLEASH the creative talents of each person he employed.

Those still hanging on to the myth of "I'm not Creative" do so at their peril. In the 21st century, individuals who develop new, creative solutions are the ones who will thrive. Admit it...you've got the juice...you're just feeling rusty! This month's feature article addresses what you can do to start those creative juices flowing again, Edison style.

Sarah with Sir Ken Robinson at The Francis Parker School in Chicago.

In June, I'll be offering a number of Edison's views on innovation and creativity in my keynote "The Revolution of Creativity" at the CPSI Conference June 21 - 24. (NOTE: CPSI stands for Creative Problem Solving Institute.) Few organizations anywhere in the world have done more to advance the understanding of what creativity is - and how it operates - than CPSI has. Bravo!

I'd also like to recognize the exceptional work fellow author Sir Ken Robinson (at right) has done to spur conversations about creativity, and how we can bring it back into America's classrooms. Sir Ken's book Out of Our Minds is a classic creativity text. And his new book, The Element describes the connection between passion and creativity. Edison would approve!

Please welcome a "creative" new addition to Edison's Notebook...The Edison Awards. This new newsletter section will highlight information about what's happening with the Edison Awards throughout the year. This month, the guarantor of The Edison Awards -- The Edison Papers at Rutgers University – is featured. Happy reading!

To your innovation success,

PS: Please share this newsletter with a co-worker or a friend!

Feature Article - The Creativity Revolution - Igniting Innovation

(click here to view past newsletter issues)

Many organizations confuse creativity with innovation, thinking that "if we become more creative, we'll automatically be more innovative, right?" Well, it's not quite as simple as that.

Edison believed all persons are born equipped with an innate capacity to be creative, no matter their station in life. Using what today we would describe as "whole brain thinking techniques," Edison first polished the creative faculties of every worker in his employ, then unleashed them.

Innovation for Edison, however, involved an even larger and more complex series of processes requiring diverse skill and a unique mindset. He believed innovation required a continuous integration of qualitative and quantitative factors, which he modeled in his Five Competencies of Innovation.

Bottom line: Innovative thinking and innovation-driving behaviors can be taught (or encouraged), but creativity is innate and must be "unleashed," then nurtured. Think of creativity as a critical ignition point for innovation in your organization...not a substitute for it.

Our Creative Capacities As Adults Are Rusty
Traveling across the U.S. since the 700-point September 2008 stock market dive, I've been struck by how many more questions I receive on "what it takes to foster creativity," and how organizations can use creativity to spark innovation in the workplace.

Why all these questions now? The current economic downturn has accentuated the flat-footedness of most adults when it comes to "being creative" on demand. Employers are realizing that our creative capacities are not only exceptionally rusty by the time we leave high school, college, or graduate school - but that they must also be fostered in the workplace if they are to survive at all.

What can we do?

Creativity Must Be Practiced If It Is To Remain At Your Fingertips
I had the pleasure of hearing Sir Ken Robinson speak here in Chicago on April 20th during a dedication ceremony at a local private school. Sir Ken focused on the role of "passion" as a creativity driver, and how it plays a central role in our ability to maintain our creative capacities over time.

He cited sobering statistics from a recent study on creativity and its relationship to "genius" - clearly a subject which would interest Edison. But - importantly - these statistics also shed light on why we adults have to work so hard at being creative, no matter our IQ.

In the study, over 100 individuals of each age group were asked to identify as many possible uses for a paperclip as they could within 2 minutes. "Genius Level" is considered the ability to identify 15 or more uses within this time frame.

I was shocked to hear that by the time we reach age 25, we have only 2% of the creative capacities we did at age 5:

What the organizers of the study learned is that the most creative individuals - at any age -- reframed the question they were asked before answering it. Instead of taking the question at face value - "What can you do with a paper clip?" they redefined what a paper clip could be. For example, for one respondent, a paper was 200 feet tall and made of foam rubber rather than a one-inch long object made of metal. The most creative respondents created new worlds in which paper clips looked - and behaved - quite differently than "normal." Is that what you would have done?

"Lifetime Learning" is A Desire Present in Only 10% of the U.S. Adult Population
As if these figures revealing the rusting of our creative capacities were not sufficiently alarming, a recent Harvard study indicated that a mere 10% of adults in the U.S. have a "learning mindset." This means that only10% of those who graduate from high school, college, or graduate school believe that they will actually continue to learn - and WANT TO CONTINUE LEARNING - over the course of their lives. For Edison, the desire for lifelong learning was a key distinguishing factor of the successful innovator...and the mark of an individual who could keep their creative capacities alive!

Jim Collins times himself and tries to stick to his goal of spending half his workday on creative pursuits like his research. To keep the "other" category small, he keeps his company small.

International best-selling author Jim Collins' own personal habits offer an excellent example of the way Edison might approach nurturing creativity as an igniting point for innovation. In a New York Times article appearing on 5/23/09, Jim Collins' new book How the Mighty Fall is profiled. Collins describes how he keeps his creative mind sharp amidst the hectic pace of his life as a teacher and consultant. Amazingly, he spends 53% of his time on Creative endeavors (rock climbing, research, writing), 28% on Teaching, and 19% on Other (parenting, perhaps?). In other words, Jim Collins makes Creativity a priority. It's not an afterthought. He actively nurtures the creative juices that arrived with his gray matter, and doesn't let them rust away. You can read more about Collins' approach here.

Together, the paperclip study and Harvard's findings on the laxity of our "learning mindset" go a long way to describe why creativity is not flourishing in most American workplaces today. Consider ways you can take a page from Jim Collins' playbook, and consciously bring Creativity into your daily world. You'll see an immediate return!

Rusty Creative Capacities Plus A Slackened Desire To Learn Sets Up Innovation Challenges

Imagine how allowing your creative capacities to shrivel diminishes your ability to innovate successfully as an adult. Imagine how stepping away from a learning environment further rusts your thought processes. This diminishment of our creativity and our learning mindset helps explain why innovation is so difficult to establish and maintain in most organizations.

As I noted in the March edition of Edison's Notebook, the tendency for roughly 80% of employees to have an "I'll wait until someone tells me what to do rather than coming up with a new idea" mindset means their creative capacities are rarely engaged. Couple this with "I don't feel like learning anything new" and employers have an extraordinary challenge when they want their employees to innovate! (To read more about creating an innovation mindset in your employees see my March 2009 newsletter.)

What You Can Do Starting Now

Here are four steps you can take to begin ramping up creativity for yourself, and your employees starting now:

• Interview new employees differently: Commit yourself to having a culture which fosters creativity. As Edison did, adopt "experiential interviewing" in your workplace to see how prospective employees respond to situational challenges. Are they seeking a specific answer to the question you pose, or can they live with ambiguity?
  
  
• Assess your own level of creativity: Do you use creativity in your work? If so, where, and how? Take the Edison Five Competencies of Innovation benchmark assessment, and see if you are incorporating the key mindsets and behaviors that creative innovators use. You can find the assessment in the back of Innovate Like Edison, or at www.innovatelikeedison.com As well, visit www.CreativeEducationFoundation.org for a host of resources. This group is affiliated with CPSI, and highly regarded.
  
  
• Every quarter, engage employees in "extreme creativity" exercises: The stark statistics shown in this newsletter underscore why re-lubricating the creative capacities in your employees must be approached forcefully, and not soft-pedaled. Consider team-building exercises like Improvisation workshops which do double-duty: they not only fire up creativity, they help co-workers engage in dialogue in new ways. Read more about Edison's creativity-building techniques - called Kaleidoscopic Thinking -- on pages 83-114 of Innovate Like Edison. Or learn more about ways you can drive creativity using these resources: www.secondcity.com, The Artist Within by Whitney Ferre, or The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, or http://improvencyclopedia.org/games/index.html.
  
  
• Request that your employees begin maintaining a notebook: Just as we lose our innate sense of balance by the age of 30, we need to practice our ability to "notice things" and "observe patterns" to stay creativity sharp. Maintaining a notebook - as Edison did - reboots the mind's ability to generate new insights. And that puts money on your bottom line! Read more about Edison's work with notebooks in Innovate Like Edison on pages 84 - 91.

Out of the Box

It's a bird...it's a plane...no, it's an iPod!

The June issue of Fast Company lists the top 100 most creative people in the U.S.

Who won? Robert Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple. Ive arrived at Apple in 1996, 3 years after Steve Jobs returned to the company following the infamous departure of failed "interim CEO" John Sculley.

Ive states that his design philosophy can be summarized as "simplicity, accessibility, honesty, and enjoyment." A senior colleague comments that Ive "...likes to make perfect stuff," and that Ive could not have enjoyed the success he's had without support from the top. "You need a CEO who gets it."

Steve Jobs clearly gets it! And he clearly "gets" Creativity, too. "Something like the iPod is the melding of design and user experience and marketing and Pop culture..."

Any of you MBA's reading this care to put metrics to that one? Very tough to do...the "creative quotient" in any product is impossible to measure. ..you gotta keep it hummin', you can't measure it, but you CAN nurture and encourage it.

What criteria did Fast Company use for their top 100 selections? "We emphasized those (people) whose creativity addresses a larger issue -- from the future of our energy infrastructure to the evolution of philanthropy to next-generation media."

See if you agree with their choices. Catch the article on pages 60 - 107 of the hardcover edition, or click here for the online version.

Events and Resources

The Edison Awards
Dedicated to America's Innovation Competitiveness in the 21st Century

THIS MONTH'S EDISON AWARDS FEATURE:
Dr. Paul Israel, Director and General Editor of the Edison Papers Project at Rutgers

Have you ever labored on something for years and years, wondering whether your efforts would ultimately result in something of value to you, or society?

Dr. Paul Israel with Sarah at the 2009 Edison Awards.

I can imagine this is how members of the Thomas Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University have felt at times, working for the past 30 years to catalogue and analyze the more than 5 million pages of Edison's notebooks, personal correspondence and business correspondence. That workload is the equivalent today of a Presidential Papers from an 8-year administration - but without the advantage of computerization!

Dr. Paul Israel (pictured at left) is the current Director and General Editor of The Edison Papers at Rutgers. He's been a part of the Edison Papers staff for over two decades, and holds his doctorate in History.

Paul is considered to be the world's leading expert on Edison today, and wrote what many believe is the definitive biography of Thomas Edison, released in 1999.

Edison Achievement Award winner David Kelley speaks with Dr. Paul Israel at the 2009 Edison Awards.
Paul speaks with Dr. Robert Rosenberg who formerly served as Director and General Editor of the Edison Pages.

Entitled, "Edison: A Life of Invention," his inspiring book played a major role in my decision to begin researching Edison's innovation methods. Paul's book has won numerous awards, including the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.

He is pictured at left with 2009 Edison Achievement Award Winner, David Kelley, Chairman and Founder of IDEO.

We are proud to have The Thomas Edison Papers serve as the guarantor of the Edison Awards, honoring innovations and innovators!

Dr. Robert Rosenberg (far left), Paul's predecessor at the Edison Papers, also attended the 2009 Edison Awards in Mountain View, CA. He contributed several important facts about Nicola Tesla to my research while writing Innovate Like Edison.

Without the work of these two thought leaders - along with their dedicated staff - the world would have only a thimble-full of knowledge about the world-changing contributions of Thomas Edison. It is an honor to know both Paul and Bob!

About Sarah Caldicott

Sarah Miller Caldicott is a great grandniece of Thomas Edison, a 25-year marketing veteran, and co-author of "Innovate Like Edison: The Five-Step System for Breakthrough Business Success." She has assembled teams of highly experienced consultants and trainers to assist her in bringing Edison's Five Competencies of Innovation™ to organizations of all sizes. Sarah and her teams are capable of addressing business challenges from a diverse array of industries, in either a business-to-consumer or business-to-business environment.

Sarah is a dynamic and award-winning speaker, whose engaging style combines substantive business content with humor. Her invaluable experience offers an ideal resource for organizations seeking innovation success in today's rapidly integrating global marketplace.

Born and raised in the Midwest, Sarah received a BA from Wellesley College, where she was named a Wellesley College Scholar. She also holds an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Sarah resides in Oak Park, Illinois, and has two teenage boys, Nicholas and Connor. For additional information on Sarah, click here.

©2009 by Sarah Miller Caldicott. All Rights Reserved.