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If your organization needs a boost in innovative thinking, you'll find lessons in history's most successful "creative hothouses," such as ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England, and Parisian cafe society.
History's most creative communities enchant us with the divine quality of their achievements. The high performance level of such groups can be attributed to the "creative hothouse effect," which results from a powerful but unusual pattern in human activities. Uncovering the inner dynamics of these creative hothouses can provide clear guidelines for dramatically increasing creative activity within organizations today.
Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, and Elizabethan England represent just a few such dazzling historical moments. More recently we can include such informal communities as the early twentieth-century physicists or their contemporaries among painters and writers gathered in Paris around Picasso, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein. The creative hothouse does not always require a formal institutional context, but an environment of mutually stimulating creativity that flourishes on experimentation.
To be described as a "creative hothouse," an organization or community must:
1. Sustain a high level of innovative creativity for a significant period of time. "Innovative creativity" means that the group creates objects, ideas, systems, or ways of doing things that did not previously exist. This contrasts with the "maintenance" creativity characteristic of many cultures whose creative agenda is to nurture tradition.
2. Establish a lasting legacy to which future generations continually return. Subsequent generations tend to be drawn to the creative "masterpieces" of the past. But such products also enter into the bloodstream of a culture. The art, buildings, technology, ideas, social and political arrangements, and beliefs produced and inspired by intensely creative groups define the landscapes-- physical and conceptual-through which future creators travel and draw inspiration.
3. Spawn "geniuses" whose achievements build upon the contributions of often brilliant contemporaries. While creativity is popularly viewed as the fruit of one person's inspiration and dedication, it does not happen in a social vacuum. Creative luminaries generally require a community of creators to fully express their gifts.
4. Stand at the center of a wider cultural movement. The creative hothouse focuses currents of thought and activity flowing across a broad geographical arena. The hothouse intensifies and invigorates these currents, transforming them into something "rare and strange" that has a...