The new Steering Committee consists of:
1. Adrienne Viljoen (SABS Design Institute)
2. Pieter Nortje (ESKOM)
3. Isaiah Engelbrecht (IDC)
4. Jayshree Naidoo (DBSA)
5. Nicky Koorbanally (CSIR Meraka Institute)
6. Geanne Gelderblom (FNB)
7. Marelie Ehlers (IDC)
8. Nkosiluncedo Jakavula (ESKOM)
9. Daniel Theron (TIA)
10. Audrey Verhaeghe (RIIS)

Downloads:
SAINe Biennial General Meeting Minutes
Constitution of SAINe Voluntary Association

The 2010 State of the Future report has been released and is available to interested parties at a cost of R375 per book. Among the regular sections in the ninety page State of the Future report are the annually updated analyses of the fifteen key global challenges, as well as the publication of the State of the Future Index (SOFI). The index identifies areas in which there has been either an improvement or deterioration during the past 20 years and creates projections for these scenarios over the coming decade. All relevant and recognised studies by the UN or World Bank are distilled as part of these projections.

The Millennium Project is willing to offer SAINe members a 20% discount on the book (therefore R300 per book).

The 2010 State of the Future report book launch will take place 30 September 2010, please find the details below.

RSVP by 17 September 2010 to: gmp@sampnode.co.za

State of the Future Book Launch

Presenting the world’s leading international authority in the field of critical, creative, innovative and deliberate thinking. Dr Edward de Bono revolutionizes the way we think about thinking.

Date: 14 October 2010
Time: 08:30 – 16:30
         Networking & Cocktails: 16:30 -
Venue: Old Mutual Business School, Jan Smuts Drive, Pinelands, Cape Town

For more information go to www.theprogressconference.com

Creativity experts from all over the world will present sessions and workshops (Download brochure).

• The registration opens at 1300 on Tuesday 5 October 2010.
• Four 2-hour workshops start at 1500 followed by the opening ceremony that evening.
• 22 Workshops will be presented during Wednesday and Thursday 6 and 7 October 2010.
• Six workshops will be presented on Friday 8/10 followed by the closing ceremony and morning tea.
• The dress throughout the conference is informal.
• The registration fee includes accommodation as well as meals and tea/coffee/snacks during tea-breaks.

Date: 5-8 October 2010
Venue: Klein Kariba Resort, Bela-Bela, South Africa

Registration fee: R4250,00 + R595,00 (VAT) = R4845,00. (US$580; E400). (This is a 2% increase from last year’s fee).(PLEASE CONTACT US FOR INFO REGARDING OUR REDUCED FEES IF YOU REGISTER TEN OR MORE DELEGATES!)

SAINe members get 10% discount

The registration fee includes:
Registration, accommodation, and ALL MEALS plus attendance of all sessions, workshops and evening entertainment.

You can register at:
www.sacreativity.com
OR
E-mail: enab@iafrica.com
OR
Tel/Fax: Ena at 014736 2099 or 012 460 7823

PLEASE NOTE:
An important addition to the accommodation! Last year delegates made use of the caravan park at Klein Kariba Resort and recommended that we include the caravan park in the accommodation offered to delegates. We are able to secure 20 CARAVAN STANDS. This is wonderful for those of you who would like to bring your family to enjoy a short holiday while you attend the conference. Please contact us for the reduced caravan registration fee.

For more information click here. ]]> http://www.saine.co.za/?feed=rss2&p=2729 0 http://www.saine.co.za/?p=2724 http://www.saine.co.za/?p=2724#comments Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:02:59 +0000 Saine http://www.saine.co.za/?p=2724

Date: 6 October 2010
Time: 08:30 – 16:30
Venue: Crowne Plaza, Johannesburg (Previously The Rosebank Hotel)

FACILITATED BY INTERNATIONAL AUTHORS ROBERT JOHNSTON AND DOUG BATE!

Keeping up with changes in customers, markets, technologies, and trends requires an ongoing ability to find new and better ways to create value for both customers and organisations. That is the essence of innovation – finding new ways to create value. This one-day workshop will show how learning to brainstorm is not enough to create a culture of innovation in your organisation. The secret to success in innovation is creating a simple system in your organisation that will foster and support innovation activities that lead to breakthrough results.

Join Bob Johnston and Doug Bate, authors of The Power of Strategy Innovation, as they share their insights on how to create a culture of innovation for any organisation that will lead to significant results and overall growth. They will draw on examples from well-known international organisations they have worked with as well as their experiences with a company in South Africa that has recently adopted an innovation system for meeting their growth goals.

A Harvard Business School case will be used to highlight how Procter & Gamble began, with the help of Johnston and Bate, their highly successful Innovation journey. You and your team will learn what steps you can take to make your division/department or your entire company more innovative and to dramatically increase the flow of innovative ideas that can make a significant difference to your success.

Delegates will receive a FREE copy of The Power of Strategy Innovation by Robert E. Johnston, JR and J. Douglas Bate

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME
One-day workshop (08:30 – 16:30)
• What innovation is and why it is so often misunderstood
• The many facets of innovation
• Why innovation takes hold in some organisations and not others
• The organisational immune system – barriers to innovation
• The new phase of organisational innovation – systemic innovation
• Procter & Gamble case study – the power of systemic innovation
• The four pillars of an innovation system
• The organisational mindset necessary for systemic innovation
• Creating a culture for innovation
• The role of senior executives in supporting innovation
• Innovation at the tactical and strategic levels
• The critical tool that is better than brainstorming
• How a South African company is creating a powerful innovation system
• Actions you can take to establish and maintain innovation in your department/organisation

ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
Bob Johnston and Doug Bate have been helping organisations around the world to identify innovative new business opportunities for nearly 25 years. Based on work they did with IBM Research, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, Carl Zeiss and many other companies, Bob and Doug wrote their book, The Power of Strategy Innovation. Since its publication, the principals of The Visterra Group have been working with clients internationally to introduce principles of innovation to achieve breakthrough opportunities in both their strategic and tactical challenges.

In addition to his work with Visterra, Bob Johnston is also currently the President and Chairman of the Product Development and Management Association, the leading global organisation for the use, best practices, and research of innovation in business.

Doug Bate, managing partner of Visterra, has been writing articles on innovation and hosting a segment of the Front End of Innovation Conference in 2010 in Boston.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
This workshop is designed for anyone interested in creating an organisational environment that will encourage the creation of innovative new opportunities for exceeding goals and stimulating growth. It is ideal for:

• MD/CEO
• Senior executives
• Division/department leaders
• Project teams
• Innovation champions

SPECIAL OFFERS:
• Register 3 delegates and the 4th delegate attends FREE of charge!
• Special discount for registered NPOs, SMALL BUSINESSES (30 or less employees) full-time lecturers at universities/colleges/schools – contact us for more information!
Register Online

For more information or to receive a full brochure with a registration form, kindly contact Magdeline Matlatse of Knowledge Resources +27 (0) 11 880 8540 or magdeline@knowres.co.za

One of the greatest challenges facing South Africa is the rejuvenation of its business environment. The greatest hurdle in this rejuvenation process may be the inability of entrepreneurs to access and secure financing for their initiatives. There is a perilous misconception amongst entrepreneurs in South Africa that there is simply no financing available- a misconception that contributes to insufficient business development and an intolerably high level of entrepreneurial burnout.

Contrary to popular belief, there are many agencies in South Africa dedicated to funding small and medium businesses, however the difficulty and confusion appears to be around accessing these agencies. It is essential for today’s entrepreneur to go beyond the traditional ‘blue chip’ methods of securing financing via commercial banks. Private Equity and Venture Capital are terms which were coined in the early 1950s but only gained significant momentum since the IT boom in the late 1990s. As of 2008 approximately R100 billion is under the control of private equity fund managers in South Africa and of the R100 billion, over 75 % is under management of funds that are either black influenced, black empowered or black controlled (Source: KPMG and SAVCA Venture Capital and Private Equity Industry Performance Survey of South Africa – 2009). Granted most of these funds are earmarked for investment into later stage businesses to fund their expansion and development, but there are funds that invest into high growth, technology and innovation rich businesses. This places private equity/venture capital in a unique position of being able to significantly assist with the funding, growth and sustainability of small and medium businesses and providing weight behind government’s commitment to black economic empowerment.

It is essential for entrepreneurs to understand what private equity and venture capital is and what financiers consider key elements when making investment decisions. Entrepreneurs need to understand that investors are largely risk managers, ensuring the risks of their investments are commensurate with the returns they can expect. It is important to identify and communicate the risks correctly and have concrete proposals to minimize them. The risks investors need to consider are not just the failure or success but also risks around the management team, the product, the market, the competition, the customers and of course the financial risks.

Besides these “key” elements, how do we unpack these concepts of “private equity” and “venture capital”? The term “private equity” refers to shareholder capital invested in private companies, as distinguished from publicly listed companies. Private equity funds are generally investment vehicles that invest in enterprises that are not listed on a public stock exchange. Private equity may be broadly classified into three categories, depending on the stage of development of the business being invested in. The three categories are: seed or early stage capital for start-up business, development capital for growth businesses and buy-out funding or replacement capital for businesses ready for buy-out. Usually fund managers will specialize in a particular target market and it becomes the role of the advisor or the entrepreneur to determine the matching of the entrepreneur to the appropriate fund manager.

Most entrepreneurs are pre-occupied with the final outcome to securing funding but fail to realize that more so than not, expensive funding contributes to the failure of many small and medium enterprises, and more importantly, that there are other vital aspects of their business to develop and value such as; the business model, the risks and mitigations, the skills that will be needed to develop the business, what role the provider of capital to the business should play to help develop the business, how the business will secure clients and what the sustainable competitive advantage is of their business model.

Whilst some argue that private equity is just as costly if not more so than commercial banks it is important that the capital seeker and capital provider structure the transaction with each parties needs in mind. Parting with a portion of your business is never easy but with private equity funding often comes expertise, skills and structuring that most small businesses are incapable of securing on their own.

The entrepreneur has a choice of raising capital through two primary methods, namely debt or equity.

• Debt Capital
  Debt capital is a loan that is repaid over a period of time, with the entrepreneur providing collateral to secure the loan and paying an interest rate on the repayments of the loan. The providers of the loan require the collateral as security for non-repayment and make a return on the capital provided by asking for an interest payment over and above the repayment of the initial capital provided.




• Equity capital
  Equity capital on the other hand, is capital that is provided to an entrepreneur as consideration for purchasing a portion of the entrepreneur’s business. Private equity investments as capital have considerable impacts in terms of productivity, skills development and job creation, as it includes the transfer and exchange of know-how over and beyond the mere flow of capital. Private equity and venture capital fund managers play an active role in managing their investments in companies as they derive a return from the increased valuation of their investments (not just debt repayment and an associated interest rate) and hence they focus on business development for the companies they invest in and strategically contribute to their growth

.

The ultimate aim of this short article is to draw the reader’s attention to the world of private equity funding and the opportunities available to South Africa in this arena. It could be argued that the support of government in this industry and the popularisation of this industry to the average entrepreneur could lead to sustainable business growth and development in South Africa.

J-P Fourie (Executive Officer: SAVCA, Southern African Venture Capital and Private Equity Association)

The African Copyright & Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) Project is probing the relationship between national copyright environments and access to learning materials in African countries. The project is probing this relationship within an access to knowledge (A2K) framework – a framework which regards the protection/promotion of user access as one of the central objectives of copyright law.

This project, supported by Canada’s IDRC and South Africa’s Shuttleworth Foundation, and managed by the LINK Centre at the Wits University Graduate School of Public & Development Management (P&DM) in Johannesburg, currently has research nodes in eight African countries: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda.

Each ACA2K country research team has prepared a Country Report outlining the findings of the doctrinal review and impact assessment interviews as specified in the ACA2K Methodology Guide. To download the South African Report click here.

Executive Summary

Access to knowledge in general, and access to learning materials more particularly, are of crucial importance to developing nations as they are keys to sustainable development. This research project seeks to establish to what extent, if any, copyright is fulfilling the objective of facilitating access to knowledge, particularly learning materials, in South Africa. The research tested the following two hypotheses:

• The South African copyright environment does not maximise effective access to learning materials; and
• The South African copyright environment can be changed to maximise effective access to learning materials.

In testing these hypotheses, this research examined the South African copyright environment and its potential impact on access to learning materials. The copyright environment as it is understood by this project encompasses laws, policies and practices. Therefore the report canvasses each of these in detail. The report includes a survey of relevant legislation, policies, reported case law, secondary literature and the results of impact assessment interviews conducted with relevant stakeholders.
The report observes that in South Africa, copyright law in general, and the issue of access to learning materials in particular, have recently started to attract more attention. Thus, the issues are on the radar of the relevant stakeholders.

The survey of statutes showed that South Africa’s primary piece of legislation in this field, the Copyright Act 98 of 1978, is in many respects in need of review and amendment to keep pace with international copyright legislative developments relevant to access to knowledge. As an example, it is evident that the legislation needs to be updated to speak to copyright questions born from advances in information and communication technology (ICT).

In addition to the legislation, the South African Government has recently adopted a notable policy on free and open source software (FOSS). The policy is indicative of the intention of the South African Government to lower barriers for adopting ICTs. The policy is significant in that the realisation of improved access to knowledge in South Africa relies to a significant extent on lowering barriers to adoption of ICTs.

With regard to policies implemented by stakeholders, it was evident that the university under study has a number of relevant policies. These comprehensive policies address intellectual property rights and educational technology.

The research team found that there is no reported case law that directly addresses access to learning materials. The report offers some suggestions as to why this is the case. However, there are important parallel importation and general infringement cases that may have significance for access to learning materials.

It was also found that there is a growing body of South African secondary literature that addresses the relationship between the copyright environment and access to knowledge. However, as far as access to learning materials is concerned, only a few legal academics participate in the discussion. Most relevant articles are penned either by rights-holder associations or by user advocacy groups and library associations. The majority of the (few) legal academics dealing with copyright law and access to knowledge appear to favour a less stringent copyright protection regime in South Africa in order to facilitate access to learning materials and to foster education in South Africa. In other words, this subset of the secondary literature supports the research project’s hypotheses.

In addition to the above-described desk research and its findings, the study team conducted a series of impact assessment interviews with individuals from government departments, the publishing industry and universities. Each interviewee gave insight into the intended effect and actual impact of the copyright environment on access to learning materials.

The report concludes that there is meaningful appreciation of the issues at stake but that more can be done to ensure that the copyright environment is more conducive to learning materials access.

In order to provide a holistic discussion, the report ends with case studies illustrating important issues which did not emerge clearly from the interviews. For example, case studies of a distance learning institution and of an under resourced university are presented because the ‘educational institution’ interviewees conducted for the research came from a well-resourced university that does not provide distance learning.

Ultimately, the report confirms the two hypotheses that were tested and concludes that the South African copyright legislation must be reformed to keep pace with technological advancements and recent policy and legislative advancements related to access to knowledge and learning materials.

To download the rest of this report click here.

Why I’ve banned brainstorming in my business
Brainstorming is the oldest and most widely used creativity technique in business today. So if everyone uses it, then it must work, right?
Wrong! Brainstorming might be OK for generating mediocre ideas with incremental impact, but it is completely useless for coming up with truly innovative breakthrough ideas. I’ve banned brainstorming in my business – and here is why.

Rule #1: Quantity over quality
One of the basic aims of brainstorming is to generate as many ideas as possible. In an hour session, participants might be expected to generate in excess of 50 ideas. Forcing people to rapidly come up with a bunch of ideas under heavy time constraints is a pretty good recipe for crap. In other words, 50 crap ideas. Who wants 50 crap ideas? I would much rather have one great one.

The argument that if you get 50 ideas then one of them will be good doesn’t hold water. In reality, most great ideas don’t start out great. They start out as seeds that need to be developed and nurtured in a structured approach. And brainstorming ensures that the seeds of great ideas are not given the attention they deserve.

Rule #2: Don’t judge or criticize ideas
Another golden rule of brainstorming is that participants are not allowed to criticize or judge. This is another recipe for generating crap. The ONLY way to generate great ideas is to judge them and identify their weaknesses. Great ideas are developed by identifying problems with suggested ideas and finding ways to overcome these problems. Judgement and critical thought are crucial parts of this process. Of course, we should never judge or attack participants in their personal capacity – but their ideas absolutely MUST be subject to the highest scrutiny. And if the egos of the people involved can’t handle it, then you’ve got the wrong people in the session.

Rule #3: Scheduling a brainstorming session
Most business meetings are scheduled with a specific key outcome in mind. This might relate to an action item, important decision, or feedback report. Either way, the expectation is that the outcome will be resolved within the time allocated – and it usually is.

The same thinking is applied to brainstorming sessions. The session is scheduled to start at 1pm, and by 2pm we are expected to have come up with the next big idea for the business. Unfortunately, creativity cannot be ordered on demand. Big ideas don’t stick to meeting schedules.

So that’s why I’ve banned brainstorming sessions in my business. I’m sure there are a lot of people who disagree with me. But ask yourself – how many truly great ideas have come out of brainstorming sessions that you’ve been involved in?

Any thoughts?

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”

The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).

In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.

To understand exactly what should be done requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience. The lore of pop psychology is that creativity occurs on the right side of the brain. But we now know that if you tried to be creative using only the right side of your brain, it’d be like living with ideas perpetually at the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.

The good news is that creativity training that aligns with the new science works surprisingly well. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, and Taiwan’s National Chengchi University each independently conducted a large-scale analysis of such programs. All three teams of scholars concluded that creativity training can have a strong effect. “Creativity can be taught,” says James C. Kaufman, professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

So what does this mean for America’s standards-obsessed schools? The key is in how kids work through the vast catalog of information. Consider the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio. Mindful of Ohio’s curriculum requirements, the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders: figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals.

Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?

Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.

Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer. When UGA’s Runco was driving through California one day with his family, his son asked why Sacramento was the state’s capital—why not San Francisco or Los Angeles? Runco turned the question back on him, encouraging him to come up with as many explanations as he could think of.

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

Having studied the childhoods of highly creative people for decades, Claremont Graduate University’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and University of Northern Iowa’s Gary G. Gute found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites. Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity. Preschoolers who spend more time in role-play (acting out characters) have higher measures of creativity: voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives. When playing alone, highly creative first graders may act out strong negative emotions: they’ll be angry, hostile, anguished. The hypothesis is that play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.

In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds. Kids revisit their paracosms repeatedly, sometimes for months, and even create languages spoken there. This type of play peaks at age 9 or 10, and it’s a very strong sign of future creativity. A Michigan State University study of MacArthur “genius award” winners found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function. Some scholars go further, arguing that lack of creativity—not having loads of it—is the real risk factor. In his research, Runco asks college students, “Think of all the things that could interfere with graduating from college.” Then he instructs them to pick one of those items and to come up with as many solutions for that problem as possible. This is a classic divergent-convergent creativity challenge. A subset of respondents, like the proverbial Murphy, quickly list every imaginable way things can go wrong. But they demonstrate a complete lack of flexibility in finding creative solutions. It’s this inability to conceive of alternative approaches that leads to despair. Runco’s two questions predict suicide ideation—even when controlling for preexisting levels of depression and anxiety.

In Runco’s subsequent research, those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships. They are more able to handle stress and overcome the bumps life throws in their way. A similar study of 1,500 middle schoolers found that those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed. They were sure that their ability to come up with alternatives would aid them, no matter what problems would arise.

When he was 30 years old, Ted Schwarzrock was looking for an alternative. He was hardly on track to becoming the prototype of Torrance’s longitudinal study. He wasn’t artistic when young, and his family didn’t recognize his creativity or nurture it. The son of a dentist and a speech pathologist, he had been pushed into medical school, where he felt stifled and commonly had run-ins with professors and bosses. But eventually, he found a way to combine his creativity and medical expertise: inventing new medical technologies.

Today, Schwarzrock is independently wealthy—he founded and sold three medical-products companies and was a partner in three more. His innovations in health care have been wide ranging, from a portable respiratory oxygen device to skin-absorbing anti-inflammatories to insights into how bacteria become antibiotic-resistant. His latest project could bring down the cost of spine-surgery implants 50 percent. “As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

Published 10 July 2010 by Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html)

Abstract
What do our customers really want? Who are the customers we should concern ourselves with? How do we get the right voice of the customer? Do our customers really know what they want? Have these questions ever sparked debate within your organizations?
Typically organizations address these questions from a process improvement perspective. The organizations that have approached these questions from an innovation perspective have found that the opportunities identified have a tendency to be within the realm of traditional improvement disciplines. How do we break free of the ‘improvement bonds’ to freely innovate? Better yet, how do we leverage our experience and knowledge of improvement tools to enhance our innovative abilities?

The Problem
On average, 90% of all companies fail to trace out their growth trajectory in the long run. This is due to numerous factors, for instance a gradual decrease in shareholder returns, failure to “keep up with the times”, a lack of “innovative capability”, etc. The bottom line is that organizations have to address the question… “What next?” This has proved to be a most difficult question to answer for the majority of large to medium corporations. Forbes magazine, for their 70th anniversary, did a comparison of their top 100 American companies from 1917 to 1987. The result: Only 18 of the original companies appeared on the 1987 list, 61 companies from the original list did not exist anymore and 21 companies fell off the list. The fact is, only 1 company on the original list continued to perform better than the overall market (General Electric).
The current mindset around process improvement is to ask of your customers the question “How can we improve our performance?” This, in itself, locks the resulting opportunities well into the realm of “improvement” and will yield no innovative opportunities. A step further is to ask… how we can improve the perception of our services/products, brand image and customer experience. This approach may yield either improvement or innovative opportunities. However, it is only as a result of luck and of team creativity. Since most of us are seasoned veterans at improvement methodologies, the chances of identifying an innovative opportunity are slim.
Having experienced these phenomena, it is logical to conclude that improvement methodologies hinder innovation. After all, moving from one maturity S-curve to the next is analogous to moving from a 2-dimensional view to 3. This can only be made possible by two critical success factors:
• Applying the rigor of a methodology and
• Practice, practice, practice.
The key to starting at the right level is ignoring the performance and perception expectations of the customer in the beginning and asking the questions:
• What is the Outcome expectation of the customer?
• What is the actual “Job-To-Be-Done” of the process, service or product?
Professor Theodore Levitt of the Harvard Business School said; “People who buy power drills don’t necessarily want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole”. In this case the Job-To-Be-Done is “Acquire a quarter-inch hole”. How we go about getting the Job done is dependent on the outcome expectations or, in other words, the solution we choose (the drill being just one solution), is dependent on attributes of how well the job gets done. To rephrase the statement above, if one can think of “hiring a solution” as opposed to simply buying a product, then the outcome expectations would reflect the “hiring criteria”. What makes a customer choose one solution rather than the other?

Understanding the Methodology
BMGI’s D4 methodology has been designed to specifically separate improvement ideas from innovative ones; not only separate the two, but nurture or flush out more of either. The D4 methodology is broken up into 4 phases: Define, Discover, Develop, and Demonstrate.

The various phases address the questions around the “Job-To-Be-Done” (JTBD).
In the Define phase, various tools are utilized to seek out the essential JTBD and leveraging these, identifying other related JTBD. The next step within the Define phase is to identify all the outcome expectations associated with each JTBD. These are rigorous exercises and effectively allow the team to traverse both inside and outside the box.
The Discover phase is where all the creative ideas are generated. A ubiquitous fallacy is that people are either born creative or not. The tools within Discover allow for anyone to be creative and to stretch, flex and exercise the team’s creative muscles. The tools are mostly designed to harness the creativity of the entire team.
Within the Develop phase the lengthy list of ideas are refined, scoped and prioritized.
In the Demonstrate phase a few concepts are selected and pilot studies are conducted to demonstrate how comprehensively they address the various Jobs-To-Be-Done and their respective Outcome Expectations. This is followed by a launch of the new process, service or product.

How the Methodology Solves the Problem
The JTBD view changes the direction of the team’s focus, away from the limitations of current processes and conditions to what the real JTBD is. Innovation opportunities are incredibly sensitive to the starting point. Where typically one would conduct a Value Stream Assessment to identify improvement opportunities, which is highly process-focused, in the world of innovation the focus would be on the “Job Stream Assessment”, viz:
• How does the customer of the process, service or product fulfil the JTBD?
• What “Work-around” or “Backdoors” are they using to achieve a JTBD?
This allows the team to move away from traditional improvement thinking towards innovation. The exercising of the creativity muscle must be conducted routinely to get better at these techniques.

Conclusion
Traditional improvement techniques only stifle innovation if one allows it. As mentioned above, the perspective and the starting points are critical success factors as well as the utilizing of the appropriate methodology, which provides enough structure to become creative within it. Creativity fitness is an immovable object and must be worked into the DNA of the innovation team.

by Peter J. Jansen van Nieuwenhuizen
© July 30, 2010

ABSTRACT – Stress inhibits creative thinking in the twenty-first century firm. As firms increasingly form part of the knowledge economy, lower creative thinking can, eventually, make the firm competitively irrelevant. Managers must understand the link between creative thinking and stress.

1. INTRODUCTION

Decisions and actions taken by management can disrupt innovation initiatives in a firm for many years. An action that has the most destructive effect on innovation is any form for restructuring. Whether the restructuring is accompanied with job losses or not, is of lesser importance from the innovator’s perspective. This article wants to discuss the effect of restructuring on innovation campaigns.

Any restructuring in a firm creates significant levels of stress. Even when the restructuring does not cause job losses, stress is ever present during the uncertainties before and after the restructure action. During this time, innovation efforts take a lower priority within the firm. This is especially the case where the firm asks staff to be part of a firm-wide innovation campaign. Briefly, it is generally accepted that staff are effective to identify innovations because they are closer to the so-called “coal face” than are the management teams. For the purpose of this article, it is assumed that the majority of the firm’s innovations are generated by staff other than a specialist innovation unit. Even when innovation is done exclusively by specialists that are separate from the firm, an action such as restructuring can have devastating effects on the overall innovation output from the firm.

The innovation campaigns of two different firms were compared. Firm A is a defunct financial services organization that operated in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The other is a well known bank in a country that merged four brands into one new brand during the mid-1990’s. Graphs tracking the innovation campaigns for both firms show distinct peaks and valleys. The first year marks the start of each innovation campaign. Readers must observe that one campaign ran between June 1991 and June 1997. The other campaign ran from March 1996 to October 2002. The only commonality between the campaigns is that both companies were in the financial services industry but the companies were located in two different countries.

2. RESTRUCTURING EFFECTS FOR FIRM A

At the end of Year 1 in the innovation campaign for Firm A, it was announced that the firm has been bought by a large insurance company. It was also announced that all staff will be retained, although management will have to be restructured. It meant that some managers were transferred to other departments. It also meant that some staff would be transferred. A decline in the number of innovations between Year 2 and Year 3 were observed and the firm could not understand the cause of the decline. Although staff communicated to management that they are under high uncertainty about their roles in the new structure, management firmly held onto a view that staff are not motivated enough and that they should be paid more so that they can work harder. A salary increase of 5% was announced but the innovation campaign still declined.

Figure 1: Effect of Restructure on Innovation – Firm A

At the end of Year 5 of the campaign, Firm A announced that its share price is falling and that another restructure (this time with job cuts) would be necessary to save the firm. Barely six weeks later, the company’s share price sharply fell from $ 54-00 to $ 0-00 in a very short time and the company became yet another pre-Enron tale of corporate bankruptcy.

3. RESTRUCTURING EFFECTS FOR FIRM B

In the case of Firm B, a clear decline of innovations is seen at the end of Year 4.

Figure 2: Effect of Restructure on Innovation: Firm B

At the start of their campaign, the four brands in Firm B have been seen as a unit for at least two years. High optimism was observed in the firm and everyone had high hopes for the future. At the end of Year 4, a restructure was announced and the firm assured staff that no job losses would result from this restructure. Despite the firm’s assurances, innovations sharply declined in Firm B.

4. CORRELATION BETWEEN FIRM A AND FIRM B

Announcements made by the two firms clearly created a negative effect to the innovation campaign of each firm. In each case, staff had a negative perception of announcements made by the two firms in this study. In each case where restructure was announced without a threat of job losses, innovations declined. Observations showed a direct link between staff morale and the level of new ideas being generated. Despite efforts from management, neither Firm A not Firm B could succeed to change the declining innovation curve.

5. LINKAGE BETWEEN STRESS AND DECLINE IN INNOVATION

Stress seems to have a definite contribution towards the rapid decline in intra-firm innovations. When any person stresses, it follows that a strong survival impulse takes over and that the brain sees creativity as secondary or tertiary to survival. Employees under stress are therefore not able to concentrate and be creative because the part in the brain that is responsible for creative thinking is completely overridden by the survival response.

A recent (29 July 2010) seminar about brain power indicated that stress releases two key chemicals in the brain: cortisone and adrenaline. Both chemicals heighten an individual’s survival instinct. Blood pressure rises, heart beats increase and the person under stress can no longer think clearly. A different set of brainwaves take over as the stressed employee moves from a so-called Alpha state into so-called Beta and Gamma waves. Although Beta waves increases alertness, it also increases a person’s anxiety levels, thus lowering the potential to think creatively. Higher states of stress can trigger the so-called Gamma waves which, in turn, generate a so-called Rambo-effect in the person under stress. High survival instinct kicks in and creativity takes last place in the brain’s list of priorities. The brain is following a sort of triage and any activity in the Beta or Gamma state that is not directly related to survival, is simply overruled by the brain. Figure 3 attempts to show the correlation between stress levels and creative thinking or productivity.

Figure 3: Link between Stress and Creative Thinking

The stressed worker does not have control over the brain’s decision to suddenly move into the state of anxiety. In many cases, the stressed worker cannot understand what is happening to him/her. There is no understanding why concentration becomes impossible and why productivity lowers dramatically. Managers, on the other hand, observe the stressed worker as “difficult” or “not suitable for the job”.

Managers should be aware of the fact that stress and lower levels of creativity are irretrievably linked to one another. Managers should compare their own stress levels and their own ability to be creative when under stress. The belief that one performs better under stress is simply not true and literature shows that performance under stress is a myth. In fact, the myth perpetuates because some managers in some firms view the link between stress and lower performance as so-called soft issues. The stressed worker is expected to “snap out of it and go on with the job”.

6. CONCLUSIONS AND THE WAY FORWARD

As firms move more toward knowledge economies, it should be abundantly clear that the worker’s ability to do creative work is more taxed than ever before. Continuous exposure to stress will cause the firm to deteriorate because it will not be able to use its collective knowledge creatively. Organizational knowledge is firmly founded in the worker and the worker’s ability to create new products or services is based on that knowledge. Any action that can hinder the worker’s ability to focus on creative thinking should therefore be considered with care.

Little or no research has been done regarding the link between stress and innovation as it occurs in the South African firm. It is time that the relationship is fully understood so that firms can make the most of the knowledge economy. Any lack to create environments with lower stress levels will mean that firms depending on the knowledge economy will become competitively irrelevant. And that may happen quicker than the firm may realise.

7. REFERENCES

Anonymous Stress Point Analysis – Identifying and Overcoming the Barriers to Operational Excellence

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.supply-chain.org.uk/Research_Papers/Introduction_Stress_Point_Analysis.pdf

Anonymous The Business Case for Creativity and Innovation

Accessed on July 30, 2010 from http://www.ukwon.net/files/kdb/06142e6bfcafb45f0c7a8374d2f7e4e5.pdf

Anonymous Breaking the Myth that Stress Builds Productivity in the Workplace
HeartMath to Present Research Findings at the 35th Annual National Wellness Conference

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.heartmath.com/templates/ihm/press_room/pdf/national-wellness-conference-july2010.pdf

Anonymous The Business Case for Stress Management: What Employers Can Do About It

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://info.4imprint.com/wp-content/uploads/m0709-02-blue-paper-business-case-for-stress.pdf

Anonymous THE ANS/HRV AND STRESS RELATIONSHIP

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.qvive.com/en/downloads/The%20ANS-%20HRV%20and%20stress%20relationship.pdf

Christoupoulou, Popi and Makropoulos, Constantin Work-Oriented Innovation In Greece

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.workinnet.org/dateien/Del_6_2_Greek-work-report.pdf

Gelb, Michael J. and Caldicott, Sara Miller “Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor”

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.brainreactions.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/innovatelikeedisonpreview.pdf

Groenen, Jacques and Ramaekers, Peter Total-brain Leadership and Innovation. How to be successful in the knowledge economy

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.fun-da-mental.nl/Fun-da-Mental%20-%20KM-Leadership.pdf

Lee, David Employee Stress and Performance

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.balanceonthego.com/Employee_Stress_and_Performance.pdf

Lind-Kyle, Patt Heal Their Minds (and Fill Your Coffers): How Rewiring Employees’
Brains Can Alleviate Stress, Boost Innovation, and Supercharge Productivity

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.aaid-implant.org/uploads/cms/documents/practice_management_rewire_employees_brains.pdf

Lööf, Hans and Heshmati, Almas ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INNOVATION AND PERFORMANCE: A SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/EINT/Loof_Heshmati.pdf

Pacek, Antonija Inspiring Creativity in Leaders with Music as a Medium

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.inspireimagineinnovate.com/PDF/Inspiring_Creativity_in_Leaders_article_Antonija_Pacek.pdf

Shrader, Erika and Matheson, Angela A DEEPER LOOK INTO STRESS AND WORKLOAD IN THE BC PUBLIC SERVICE. WORK ENVIRONMENT SURVEY, NOVEMBER 2009

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/ssa/reports/WES/2009/analytics09_8.pdf

Weehuizen, Rifka MENTAL CAPITAL: THE ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF MENTAL HEALTH

Accessed on 30 July 2010 from http://www.merit.unu.edu/training/theses/Thesis_Weehuizen_final.pdf

THAT ESSENTIAL PARADIGM SHIFT …

In ensuring that we are educating tomorrow’s adults to respond adequately to social and environmental issues with the urgency and understanding they require, we need to facilitate a number of mindset changes. First and foremost, we all need to change our perception of the implications inherent in the concept of “dominion” in the 21st Century. An historically accepted interpretation, which is responsible for the global consumerist trend, and also for the serious ecological issues with which we now grapple, is that of “ownership.” At a school such as ours, we equate “dominion” with “stewardship.” This implies that we have co-responsibility for the survival of Earth and its resources. It also implies that any benefit derived from the responsible use of the Earth’s resources must be equitable, with special emphasis being given to the needs of the poor, marginalised and the most vulnerable members of any society, and that these may not be exploited by, or for, material gain. Earthcare Education has to be foremost on any educational agenda.

Another mindset change which needs to be made is an entrenched subconscious acceptance by many South Africans, that there will always be people whose” job it is” to clean up after us. We need somehow to create that delicate balance between “ownership” and “stewardship.” To put it simply, unless we can move people to feel a sense of pride and “ownership” on one level, of the spaces they occupy, we shall not succeed in eradicating the serious litter problem which is a scourge of our society.

As our contribution to working towards a “cleaner-greener world,” we have taken recycling to a new level. Our Recycling Village, built almost completely of recycled materials, and surrounded by recently planted, indigenous trees, pays tribute to our commitment to making a lasting difference to the way in which our young people embrace “Earthcare.” Every Thursday, from early morning, the Village is a hive of activity, with our dedicated team of volunteer-moms overseeing the process of sorting, as parents and children arrive with their packaged recyclables – all washed and squashed. Something that began as a small initiative, driven by a few eco-friendly Moms who wanted to make a difference, has captured the imagination of a community. We are attempting to apply the concept of “Use – Re-Use – Recycle” to all spheres of school-life. This means that we clear out storerooms regularly, as there can be no hording of equipment such as furniture, books, stationery. These are re-used, either through re-sale and donations, with all money generated being channelled into maintenance and development of our Village, re-used in less wealthy school communities as part of our outreach or fully recycled.

QUESTIONS AND OBSTACLES FOR RESOLUTION:
1. While recycling is being embraced more widely we are not yet fully making the connection between the importance of recycling, and our litter problem. Even within our community, where brightly coloured recycling bins are very visible, some children still drop papers and cans without even being aware that they are doing it? How do we make young people fully aware of their connection to, and responsibility for, Earthcare?
2. What is the creative alternative to consumerism?
3. How do we unite people to bring pressure to bear on producers to use only recyclable packaging?
4. The following statement appeared in the Sunday Times, The Workplace” on 11 July 2010. “Greg Walton, the CEO of The Green Shop ….believes that the green revolution will take off only when environmental issues are seen as mainstream concerns rather than a radical view.” How do we bring about that paradigm shift?

The Millennium Project is willing to offer SAINe members a 20% discount on the book (therefore R300 per book).

State of the Future Report

The seminar is free.

WBS SMI Invitation Gastrow