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[Music playing]
I've been at Strathclyde now for seven and a half years,
and I came from the University of Auckland.
I started life as a scientist,
as a geothermal reservoir scientist actually,
and did a lot of work in environmental geophysics
and that sort of thing in New Zealand,
and actually around the world.
And as my career advanced, as it progressed,
increasingly I found myself in a position
where I was managing teams
of scientists doing the work, you know.
So I found myself moving away
from the actual field science work and into much more
of a business orientated enquiry into how it is
that scientists work together,
how it is their creative new ideas are generated,
how it is that we get to innovation
through the social processes that scientists engage in.
And from there, I've gone on to work
in all sorts of other contexts.
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I think creativity and innovation are words
that are used in all sorts of different ways by all sorts
of different people to mean all sorts of different things.
So for me, innovation is the outcome, it's the output
from a creative process.
So I see creativity is all about the process that goes on.
There's been a huge amount of research over the years trying
to find what is the essence, you know,
what is the secret ingredient
that defines the creative genius.
There was a big study done
by a professor called Csikszentmihalyi who looked
at Nobel Prize Winners, and he was trying to find
out what was distinctive, what was a characteristic
of a Nobel Prize Winner.
And he came to the conclusion that the only thing
that he could find common across all of them was the fact
that they were very flexible in their means
of approach if you like.
So there's that flexibility of mind I think
which is a real characteristic of creativity.
And it's the flexibility of mind that we can develop
by staying open to different possibilities.
Creativity arises out of social interactions.
So reflecting on how you are
in social interactions I think is a key skill in helping you
to become more creative or more able to engage
in creative processes.
I think that habits, routines, standard operating procedures,
we all need them, we all use them, they're essential
for organisational life.
But they're also the things that stop us stepping out of the box
and thinking about it differently.
The fundamental reflection is to understand what are your habits?
What are the routines that you standardly engage with?
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The first thing to think about is your communication.
How effectively do you construct meaning with other people?
How effectively do you communicate meanings?
And this is a really interesting question in the context
of science, because most sciences, as you know,
have their own language.
There's a set of jargon that goes with every discipline.
Well, cross-disciplinary work is a real challenge to most of us,
because when you start working across disciplinary boundaries,
you find that people over there use a different language.
And in order to build creatively with those people,
you have to learn their language, and they have
to learn your language.
So there's some real linguistic development skills
required there.
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I think it's important from my perspective to see creativity
in every aspect of the framework.
Yes there's a particular element
which encourages the enquiring mind, for instance, and yes,
I absolutely agree curiosity, the willingness to question,
the willingness to take risks, the willingness even
to make mistakes, is fundamental to the creative process.
So I can see that that's relevant as an element
of the idea of the research development framework.
But creativity also runs throughout the entire framework.
Every element of that framework requires creativity in order
to achieve its potential.
You need to be considered in your risks, but you need
to be willing to step out of the box at least.
You don't have to step very far the first time you put your foot
out, it doesn't have to be very far, but you do need to step
out of the box of your normal habits,
your normal ways of doing things.
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