Together with Henriette Weber Anderson I am co-leading a whole day workshop on creativity September 27 prior to SHIFT (28-29 September, 2006) in Lisbon. Besides this I will also be giving a presentation about intellectual property and knowledge ownership during the SHIFT event.
About the creativity workshop:
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Carl Jung”
We are all born very creative and screaming. We go to school, learn to add and do other fancy stuff, and most of the time forget how be creative. In this “Creativity Workshop” we will playfully provide you with a remedial one day crash course aimed at having you claim back some of that creativity that you were born with, and borrow some more from your own resources. We will not solve all your creative problems and we do not promise that you will see God, however we do plan to have some fun looking into several aspects of creativity that are important in technology and life. This is an applied workshop, do come prepared to work on your own goals and to scream.
When it comes to SHIFT, Lisbon, Portugal and Creativity I am totally biased. My view is that creativity can be a can or worms if not handled properly, however there are some serious people who have been methodological about looking into it, so I feel sage – or as sage as any of this can feel – about tackling creativity in an interactive workshop where we, trainers and participants, get to do some fun playful thinking about what creativity means to them, and what use, if any, it could possibly have in their daily lives.
I have found myself recently trying to pick the brains of an Italian venture capitalist about this thing called creativity. I was fascinated by the fact that he responded that it is very important that the managing teams of the ventures that he looks into be creative, however I was unable to extract from him how he judged the presence of that creativity or what criteria he used for his assessment. So, how do you assess creativity?
Why am I biased when it comes to Lisbon and Portugal? Well, I was born in Portugal and if there is one thing that I have ever regretted in my life, that is, to have left that country. I hold no nationalistic views, however it is one beautiful piece of real estate! I love the language, and language is culture. I love the food, and food is culture.
SHIFT is being organized by Pedro Custodio and his team in Lisbon for the first time this year. He has been inspired by events like lift06 and reboot and I would like to think that this is the Atlantic coast flavour of these two great events (conference, unconference).
public man 