Innovation and Creativity are Nurtured Through Self Reflection

The culture of innovation is created with the permission to ask questions. A culture of innovation is created when people are being encouraged to refuse to accept limitations. Those limitations can be physical, but they can also be conceptual. Innovation begins with the permission that you are given to fail. When failure is tolerated, not celebrated, tolerated. When failure is understood, analyzed and studied, then failure becomes, actually, a key to success. Innovation and creativity exist only in cultures and societies that are able to be self-critical. That are accountable and responsible. When you don’t have accountability as part of the DNA of your society, it’s very difficult to excel and succeed. Innovation and creativity are nurtured by knowledge-based societies. Societies that are relying heavily on natural resources, find it very difficult to produce new knowledge because they become complacent. They’re very comfortable with all the wealth that they have and so they don’t feel the need to come up with scientific breakthroughs. So, if you combine all of those things, it’s a cultural element. It’s the element of understanding that knowledge and creativity is the number one human asset, then you understand what needs to be done in order to create a creative or an environment that is nurturing creativity and innovation. It’s happening in places where you have a lot of ethnic diversity, like New York City, like Toronto, Canada like Barcelona, like Tel-Aviv in Israel It happens in places where there is a freedom to think and freedom to speak. It’s not happening in places where there is no freedom to speak, places that are not self-critical and places that are not self-reflective. And so that is the key to nurture creativity and innovation.