Rhetoric or Reality?...
Creative network development is critical to the future success and progression of the arts, the sciences, technologies and all aspects of creative and technological development. The creative value network aims to push the boundaries between art, science and engineering aside to form a more unified an communicative relationship between the multiple disciplines, both in the sciences and in the arts.
Engineers and the creative arts have always had more to do with each other than generally appreciated. Digital technologies, bio sciences and performing arts that form under professional bodies and research councils are beginning to realise the importance of cross-disciplinary relations.
Arts Councils, research bodies for creative development and universites are supporting the Creative Value Network in its vision of the "Two Cultures" sharing a more frutful future in the light of shared input and a deeper understanding and development of their simultanious evolution...
• 'Innovation', 'Creativity' and 'Change' are high rankers in the current pecking-order of corporate rhetoric and ministerial manifestos.
And quite right, too. "Successful economies", said the Council for Science and Technology's 2001 Report (Imagination and Understanding) "depend increasingly on the creation, communication, understanding and use of ideas and images."
• So, something must now be done, the Great and the Good agree, about our dangerously out-of-date barriers between Science and the Arts and Humanities.
Faded copies of C.P. Snow's (1959) 'The Two Cultures' are being fetched furtively from the attic. Enterprising individuals and alert research funders are encouraging some modest first interchanges between poets and scientists, artists and engineers.
• We even have, since 1998, a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), richly funded to promote 'new ideas', and well versed in the language of 'Creativity' and 'Innovation'.
Four-hundred-or-so bright mavericks - inventors, scientists, musicians, performance poets - have so far briefly escaped ritual immolation by bank manager and 'investor', to breathe some fresher air. Good; but not good enough by half.
• For most of this activity is at the 'frothy' short-term end of the Innovation and Creativity need. And this 'need' is really for something much more basic and sustainable in our innovation and creative processes;
both in our mainstream educational programmes and with the inevitable 'mid-career' majorities - of professional engineers, scientists, computer programmers and others - who had little cross-disciplinary help themselves but will influence the managerial climate over many years for the younger recruit.
• This is the more realistic performance environment in which the substance and sustainability of innovation and creativity are determined.
The decision makers - in business, professions and would-be institutions of change - have been too reluctant to engage this 'heart-of-the-matter' of sustainable creativity and change; and their criteria stuck in an outdated, non-dynamic, model of knowledge-transfer.
• What primarily defeats innovation and change lies mainly in the very institutions, structures and decision processes supposedly responsible for their release.
And the best analysis of how they work to frustrate the need lies not in the mind-numbing piles of contemporary literature on innovation, but in a relatively little known pamphlet on university politics published in Cambridge in 1908.
• Microcosmographia Academica, by F.M. Cornford, describes with great wit and clarity the sophisticated apparatus of argument and politics by which ideas for change and innovation are systematically subverted. Would that he were alive and with us at this hour; for I am seeing this phenomenon devastatingly still at work in some of our leading professions, companies and, odd-to-relate, prime public agents of 'innovation change'. Even the language is uncannily the same.
Have you seen The Principle of Unripe Time at work? It demonstrates, for the Establishment mind-set, how the present is perpetually unripe for sustainable and significant innovation.
Read More About the Crative Value Network :
What is the Creative Value Network?
A talented and insightful uk poet and author of inspirational, motivational, humorous and downright funny business poetry and ballad poems about business, the arts and free thinking.
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