Creative Injection

Essential for navigating an increasingly complex business environment, creativity was rated more important than managerial skills, vision and integrity by 1,500-plus CEOS in a 2010 IBM survey.

Creativity sessions being offered this fall by the Catherwood Library are designed to help students inject simple, creative problem-solving strategies into work and school environments.

"A lot of people think that creativity is innate -- that you either have it or you don't. But, it is a skill that can be taught like any other," said Christian Miller, a Catherwood Library reference librarian and leader of the workshops.

The goals of the workshops are to:

• Expand the student's repertoire of creative problem-solving strategies to generate ideas more quickly and boost overall productivity.

• Learn to collaborate on creative initiatives to build trust and a sense of shared responsibility among team members.

• Experiment with innovation approaches to cultivate creativity in an organization.

• Make the process of innovation more accessible in order to harness the creativity of others.

• Understand the importance of failure in order to succeed more quickly.

The fall sessions haven't yet been scheduled, but a pilot workshop in April gave students practice with creativity skills not often directly addressed in classes, Miller said.

For more information about enrolling in a creativity session this fall, contact Miller at cjm267@cornell.edu.

The IBM study findings can be seen at http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy/.