I enjoyed Richard Florida's presentation on creativity this morning while doing a grocery store run. I'll never go to the grocery store without my iPod in the future, that's for sure. The presentation was given at Pop!Tech 2004 and reinforced the notion that creativity is the most important element we can nurture in ourselves, our companies, our communities and our country. Below is the ITConversations summary along with a more detailed description and link to the audio file downloads. This guy is a naturally excellent speaker. I also like him because he's a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania boy.
We're in the midst of a fundamental economic revolution, bigger than the change from an agricultural to an industrial society. It's based on creativity including technological, economic and aesthetic creativity.
Richard Florida suggests that technology alone in this creative age is not going to make us safe. We need to bring in the kind of creative entrepreneurs who can make great ideas into sustainable business models. We also need aesthetic creativity and we need to pull in political and cultural creativity. Only then, Florida says, will we get real economic growth.
He warns us however that unless we're willing to harness the creativity of people, we're going to lose the edge. As a society, we have to not only attract creative people but tap into those who don't think they're creative. He reminds us of the trends over the past couple of decades of creative people migrating to places' that foster that creativity, e.g., San Francisco, NYC, Chicago. [ Listen ]
