Background

Creativity and innovation are critical for business effectiveness, but we struggle with realizing this in our everyday organizational life.

Creativity is about coming up with new ideas but more important is innovation - ensuring that the right ones are selected, developed and implemented. Appropriate organizational structures and processes are needed to drive this.

Creativity and the ability to innovate is inherent in all of use. It is what makes us uniquely human. We are however all creatures of habit and tend to see the world in rigid ways and are blind to other perspectives. We tend to do things in ways that we have always done. We are prisoners of our habits and few of us achieve our creative potential. But if we stop for a moment and step out of ourselves, we are all capable of seeing and exploiting the immense opportunities in the world for doing things in very new and innovative ways.

Ideas are slippery elusive things that tend to evade capture. Creativity is not just about generating new ideas - we also need to capture them - this is more of a habit than anything else. But of course there are tools, techniques and technologies that can help in the generation and capture of ideas.

The vast majority of ideas can be implemented at the personal level - we do not need money, time or other resources. Implementation is simply about doing different things or doing things differently. It is at this personal level that there is huge potential for creativity and innovation.

At the inter-personal, team, project or department levels there are also opportunities that go unseen. Here simple tools such as dialogue, knowledge cafes, brain-storming and after-action-reviews can have a huge impact on creativity and innovation.

At the corporate level, without a culture that encourages creativity and risk taking and allows time for people to pursue new ideas creativity will whither and die. Not only is support needed to generate new ideas but a means of capturing them and systematically refining and selecting them is needed.

Effective innovation depends on disciplined management systems and processes such as 'idea management systems'.

It is in this context that this conference broadly explores the concepts of creativity and innovation :

• to help you recognize the need and to find the time to be more creative and innovative
• to motivate you to take active steps to become more creative, to come up with new ideas, capture them and act on them
• to help you think about technology and social trends and to spot new opportunities that come about from the result of change
• to nurture and encourage creativity within your team or department and to act on new ideas
• to introduce you to the concept of idea management systems that provide the technology and process to capture, review and implement new ideas

Who should attend?

The Gurteen Knowledge Conference is designed for:

• CKO/Knowledge Managers
• KM Project Managers
• Information Managers
• Research Managers
• Innovation leaders
• Heads of Strategic Management
• IT Directors/Managers
• Management consultants
• HR/training professionals
• Business development/marketing professionals

Speakers include

David Gurteen,, Gurteen Knowledge
Victor Newman,, Chief Learning Officer, Pfizer Research University (Europe) The Power of Provocation
Andy Burnett,, Director of Innovation, Knowledge Associates
Michael Stephenson,, Associate Partner - Human Capital Management, IBM Business Consulting Services
Creativity and Innovation: Nature or Nurture?
Mark Turrell,, CEO, Imaginatik
Sheila Moorcroft, Futures Research Consultant, Business Future
Thinking about Change
Richard Potter,, Chief Knowledge Officer, QinteQ Creating the Right Environment
Matt Mower, Partner, Evectors Software Social Networking Tools and Creativity


To register please click here or or contact Aimee Gill on +44 (0)1189 602820