Creativity and Innovation in Canadian Society and Organizations:

Some Suggestions for Policy and Action

Note: the policy proposals below were develped by Marjorie Stone (Dalhousie University), one of the participants in an international symposium on Creativity and Innovation in Canadian Society organized by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada for the 2000 Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities. They draw on research on creativity in individuals and organizations presented at the symposium by scientists, artists, psychologists, humanists and business and industry leaders. A composite set of policy proposals, drawing on input from the symposium participants, is in process of being developed for presentation to the federal government. If you have suggestions or ideas for policies you would like to see implemented or proposed, please contact mistone@is.dal.ca

1. Distinguishing creativity from innovation.

Policy planners should carefully examine the danger and shortsightedness of the current tendency to confound creativity and innovation. As Dr. Sharon Bailin (UBC) points out, creativity is a energy, not an entity. To a degree, innovation can be engineered, directed and measured in quantifiable products or entities. In contrast, creativity is a vital force that must be nurtured, motivated, given free play, stimulated and encouraged to express itself in ways that current social priorities or intellectual paradigms may not recognize as important or productive. Dr. Mark Runco, Editor of the Creativity Research Journal, points out that investigations of innovation too often focus on the products, not on the people and the creative processes and conditions that generate those products.

Ironically, one of the greatest longterm threats to creativity in Canadian society and Canadian organizations may be the emerging dominant global ideology of innovation: an ideology that constructs human creativity as something to be engineered and economically managed in order to generate products designed to maximize capital gain and market dominance within a shortened timeframe. Creativity is to innovation as the wellspring is to the river. In the current rush to harness and promote technological and scientific innovation through a utilitarian education system, increasing emphasis on targeted as opposed to foundational research, and decreasing funding for the arts and liberal arts education, Canadian policy makers are neglecting the creativity that is the source of far-reaching, transformative innovations and benefits to the public good. The suggestions for policy and action presented here are predicated on the need to restore a constructive balance between policies that foster creativity and policies that promote innovation.

2. Restoring Balance in Education.

Policy makers should consider the public statement from thirty CEOs of high-tech corporations calling for a more balanced approach to funding for postsecondary education, with emphasis upon the liberal arts as well as technology (High-tech CEOs endorse funding liberal arts, The Globe and Mail, April 8, 2000, A5). The cultural and civic literacy that programs in the humanities and arts developed are highly valued by these CEOs, and essential to success in a knowledge economy. Moreover, history shows that one-sided utilitarian educational programs can stifle creativity in individuals as well as societies. Witness the case of John Stuart Mill, rigorously educated in logic and utilitarian knowledge by his father following principles set out by the father of British Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. Mill suffered a breakdown as a young man, and a loss of any intrinsic motivation or creative energy. He cured himself by reading poetry and developing an appreciation of the arts, before going on to produce foundational and far-reaching work in political economy, philosophy, public policy and law. Education and research policies at the present moment in Canada are shaped by a narrow utilitarianism that history has repeatedly shown to be short-sighted and unproductive in the long term.

The initiative of the high-tech CEOs should be followed up by government action building upon it. For example, the Governor General could initiate a high-profile series of focus groups or symposia bringing together educators, artists, representatives of business and industry, members of the media and members of social activist or youth groups. These meetings could focus on investigating the underlying conditions that nurture creativity and on developing policy recommendations. One possibility might be to organize these in conjunction with the activities of the granting councils (following up on the Symposium on Creativity and Innovation organized at the 2,000 Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities organized by the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada). Such an initiative might lead, among much else, to the development of a unit for school curriculums that focused on the study of creativity in various disciplines or contexts. Much lip service is paid to creativity, but how often is it explicitly made an object of study, investigation and reflection in the educational system?

3. Cultivating Canadian scientific and technological creativity by cultivating the arts

Policy makers should stimulate creativity in Canadians and Canadian organizations by recommending enhanced programs of support for the arts and ensuring that appreciation of the arts is developed through well-rounded education incorporating programs in the liberal, visual and performing arts. As Dr. Bill Buxton (University of Toronto) points out, the society that most effectively stimulates creativity and innovation will strive to create the dynamic multi-faceted culture of the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, or nineteenth-century Vienna -- not a clone of the culture of a technocratic Silicon Valley. Studies of creative researchers have repeatedly shown that that images, metaphors and musical rhythms are profoundly important to the Eureka phenomenon in scientific discovery. Isaac Asimov, Robert Root-Bernstein and other writers and researchers on creativity have documented many historical instances in which the images of poetry, the visual arts, kinaesethetic activity, or the minds own dream-language have led to scientific breakthroughs. Research in philosophy, literature and cognitive science similarly underlines the importance of metaphor as a cognitive tool. Dr. Root-Bernstein points out that there is high correlation between innovation in science and the arts and creative thinking involving images or musical rhythms. For example, Einstein observed that he discovered relativity through musical intution; Fleming's medical breakthroughs grew in part out of the creative activity of fashioning art images out of bacteria; major authors have often commented on how creative works originate in a rhythm in the brain or an image; and many world-class scientists are also artists, musicians or creative writers. At the Creativity Symposium, Jim Dueck, Assistant Deputy Minister of Education for Alberta, noted that one major American study of admissions to medical schools revealed that music majors achieved the highest rate of success among candidates.

Policy makers should develop methods of making senior university administrators and business and industry CEOs more aware of the role of the arts in stimulating creative thought -- by, for example, providing seed funding for a series of public lectures across the country on creativity and innovation that bring together leading scientists, artists and innovators in industry. Such lectures should be jointly sponsored by universities, business or industries, and arts and culture groups. Within universities, business and industries, CEOs, managers and administrators could enhance awareness of the arts and promote exposure to the stimulating effects of the arts among their personnel by instituting appreciation or achievement awards that take the form of season's tickets to artistic and cultural events or visual art objects, and by bringing art displays or performances into the workplace.

4. Valuing Canada's cultural industries and reviewing CFI guidelines

Canadian policy makers should keep in mind the fact that cultural, arts and heritage industries are major engines of the Canadian economy, employing many Canadians and leading indirectly to employment opportunities for many others. Culture is also a major export of the United States globally. Yet in Canada, the initial guidelines of the $800,000-million dollar investment in the Canadian Foundation of Innovation excluded the performing arts, the humanities and social sciences entirely. Some effort has been made to make the CFI more inclusive of the liberal arts and the social sciences, but much more needs to be done in this regard. At the Symposium on Creativity and Innovation, Sara Diamond -- Artistic Director, Media and Visual Arts and Executive Producer, Television and New Media, at the Banff Centre for the Arts -- emphasized the creative and economic ripple effects of current innovations at the interface of electronic technologies and the arts involving artists, engineers, and media experts. Policy makers should recommend that the guidelines of the CFI be reviewed by a panel of experts with knowledge of Canada's arts communities and cultural industries, and the contributions these constituencies make to the economy and public good.

5. Research on the longterm outcomes of foundational versus targeted research

The last decade has witnessed a major shift, in Canada, as in the United States towards funding targeted or strategic research in partnership with private-sector industry or business and away from funding foundational research. "The Kept University," an article published in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, surveys and investigates these developments in the United States. Although this article has received much attention from Canadian university researchers and researcher administrators, there is no comparable overview of developments in Canada. We need much more research on the comparative benefits of foundational as opposed to targeted research, and on the implications of these rapid transformations in the funding environment.

Studies in other countries (for example, a study in Britain in the 1980s reported on in the Manchester Guardian Weekly) indicate that most major technological breakthroughs with important social impacts up to that time had come indirectly from foundational research, not from targeted research. Paul Berg, the Nobel-prize winning scientist credited with the research on splicing DNA in the 1970s that has since then fuelled the biotech revolution, points out in "The Kept University" (p. 54) that research of the kind he pursued, without strategic benefits recognized at the time, would probably not be supported by stable, longterm funding in the current research environment. "The biotech revolution itself would not have happened had the whole thing been left up to industry. . . Venture-capital people steered clear of anything that didn't have obvious commerical value or short-term impact. They didn't fund the basic research that made biotechnology possible." Berg cites this "as just one of the limitations of corporate research.

As the French historian Michel Foucault points out, the significance of new ideas and perspectives is often not recognized even when they meet measurable standards of truth because, for their value to be recognized, they must also be "dans le vrai" (within the true) -- that is, conceivable within existing paradigms of knowledge. Yet targeted and strategic programs are framed within these paradigms.

Policy makers should recommend that additional funding be provided to SSHRC (possibly under its RDI program) to fund research that investigates, both historically and in the current context, the comparative benefits of foundational versus targeted research programs in the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, the social sciences and the humanities. This program should also fund research on the kinds of mental processes and work environments that are correlated with high levels of creativity or innovation; on the social, cultural and economic benefits that innovations bring; and on the timeframes necessary for realization of these. The funding should include provision for the preparation of a report at the end of the program's first cycle that synthesizes the results of this research and disseminates it beyond the academic contexts. Such a report might provide valuable information to help counteract dogmatic and short-sighted attempts to evaluate and prioritize research and university programs based on quantitative measures of their immediate outcomes.

6. Cui bono? Policies on Research Ethics and Conflicts of Interest.

"The Kept University" also documents the serious conflicts of interest that have developed as research in the U.S. is increasingly funded by private industry and researchers are investors in the companies they do research for. Peer-review processes are jepordized, research questions or procedures may incorporate bias, and research results may be doctored. One U.S. study showed, for example, that tests of new pharmaceuticals funded by private corporations tended to yield significantly higher positive results than tests funded by disinterested or public sources. The Oliveri case and prominent researchers such as John Polyani have called attention in Canada to the harm that such conflicts of interest can pose for the public and for research productivity. Many researchers have also pointed to the blighting effect that recent developments in Intellectual Property law may have on the circulation of ideas and the dissemination of research results.

The TriCouncil Code of Ethics for research involving humans does not adequately address such conflicts of interest, or the implications of emerging IP protocols. How effectively is public money being spent if the research it funds is slanted from its inception, or in the review and reporting stage, by ethical conflicts and commercial interests? Should public money and publicly funded institutions underwrite the costs of research in partnership with industry if it results in undue constraints on the circulation of research findings?

Policy makers should recommend the funding of a program on research on research ethics and the changing funding environment, supporting investigations of conflicts of interest in research, and the implications of Intellectual Property law for creativity and innovation in Canadian society.

7. Cultivating Creativity by Cultivating Diversity

Many of the leading scientists, artists, educators and experts on creativity at the Congress 2000 Symposium on Creativity and Innovation emphasized the importance of exposure to diverse or new conceptual frameworks for creative thinking. Douglas Cardinal, a renowned architect of Native heritage, observed that creative thinkers must leave the security of the known, but they must also do this in an environment that offers some license for risk-taking. Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein observed that not knowing and the effective surprise of encountering what is not familiar is critical to many breakthroughs. Dr. Mark Runco emphasized that research focusing on targeted problem-solving is often not research of the most creative kind. Identifying new problems is more generative, and this creative leap is often stimulated by the cognitive challenge of a new framework, perspective, or set of pardigmatic assumptions. Just as diversity of species is a fundamental aspect of Nature's creativity and fecundity, so diversity in ideas and conceptual frameworks is crucial to human creativity. Stephen Jay Gould has shown, for example, that Darwin's discoveries were generated by the combination of grounded biological research with reading across three diverse fields of knowledge.

Canadian policy-makers can stimulate creativity through exposure to diverse ideas and frameworks by:

(a)creating more incentives for cross-disciplinary research networks that bring together researchers from divergent disciplinary backgrounds, not just teams of researchers from closely allied disciplines (for example, by ensuring that research funded by CIHR is not dominated by narrowly bio-medical models that exclude effective consideration of the perspectives offered by the humanities and social sciences);

(b)developing more knowledge about the cultures and world views of earlier historical eras through the funding of historical research across a spectrum of disciplines (histories of science, literature, social values, philosophy, etc.); ensuring that educational programs in science and technology as well as the arts include a historical component; and supporting research on concepts of creativity in earlier periods as well as the value attached to creativity (such research may reveal, for example, that the high priority given to originality and innovation in the current context today is historically contingent and open to question on various grounds);

(c)developing policies that promote more exchange among researchers from differing cultural backgrounds and more investigation of methods of fostering creativity in different cultures, both through a review of restrictive immigration policies, and through more effective implementation of programs designed to ensure that women and cultural minorities are represented in fields of research still largely dominated by white males of European descent;

(d)creating policies that more effectively support local ecologies of research diversity in regions across the country, and critically assessing the possible adverse effects that the Centres of Excellence program, the Canada Research Chairs program and increased funding for large strategic grants may have in centralizing research activity at a few major sites, thereby developing research monocultures that may prove stifling to creativity in the longterm;

(e)developing recommendations for expanded flexible programs of small grants to support seed research, speculative research not seen as strategic or valuable within current paradigms, and research that does not require large overheads (for example, some humanities research).

8. Collaboration and Creativity: New Challenges

Electronic technologies and granting council programs are stimulating collaborations on a new scale across academic disciplines and within corporations and businesses. The creativity of all participants is not always effectively acknowledged or rewarded in such collaborations, however, resulting in loss of motivation, conflict within the collaborating team, and lower productivity. Many structures and assumptions need to be investigated, and more adequate policies need to be developed to address the problems they create. These include reliance on a hierarchical principal investigator model that may be inappropriate in instances where a team of researchers or innovators has more than one leader; structures of power and dominance intensified by racial, ethnic or gender differences; adherence to a misleading "solitary author" conceptual model in citations, attributions, acknowledgements, and intellectual property rights; and career promotion protocols that do not adequately value collaborative forms of creativity because their products cannot clearly be attributed to a single individual. In The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature (1994), Peter Jaszi notes that, ironically, as new technologies promote creative collaborations on an unprecendented scale in Western capitalist culture, legal practices embedded in outmoded ideologies of the Romantic solitary genius have enjoyed a resurgence in judgements concerning intellectual property.

Policy makers should consider funding more research on collaborative ventures in the academy, industry, the cultural sector and the community sector, with the explicit aim of developing policies and guidelines to address the particular challenges and difficulties that these pose, and a fuller understanding of the benefits they may bring.

9. Investing in the creators of the future.

Policy makers should act now to nurture the collective creativity of Canadians by investing in Canada's children and youth. If "the child is the father of the man," to quote William Wordsworth, she is also the mother of the woman. Current work in neuroscience by researchers such as Sonai Mansour-Robaey (UAQM) underlines the important role that early formation plays in shaping the complex ramifying neural connections associated with creative thinking. Leading researchers on creativity such as Dr. Mark Runco (California State University), Editor of the Creativity Research Journal, point out the important role of intrinsic motivation, ideation and association in stimulating original thought. Intrinsic motivation in adults is often embedded in the memories and experiences of childhood and adolescence. Cognitive scientists Jefferson A. Singer and Peter Salovey emphasize in The Remembered Self (1993) that the life-goals of creative individuals are shaped by core self-defining memories formed in the earlier phases of their development. Research in literature and the arts on artistic genius bears out the crucial importance of formative experience in fostering creativity.

Canadian policy makers have frequently spoken of investing in children and youth, but the reality remains that the number of children living in poverty in Canada has steadily grown over the past decades. A recent UN report reveals, in fact, that Canada, despite its relative wealth, has fallen to a new low among industrialized countries in its statistics of child poverty.

10. Ensuring Accessibility to Education

Vigorous action is called for to ensure that public education in Canada remains accessible and well-rounded, from the primary to the post-secondary levels. Policy makers should consider implementing a national education policy and establishing a national ministry of education. Cuts to federal transfer payments and the policies of the provincial governments have resulted in the slashing of school budgets at the primary and secondary levels, often resulting (as in Nova Scotia) in the phasing out of programs for special needs children, or stimulating programs in art and music. We should not forget that Stephen Hawking was a special needs child. More and more students are also finding postsecondary education inaccessible, and the students who do attend universities and colleges increasingly fall into two classes: those who have to work thirty or more hours a week while they struggle to carry a full load of classes, and those whose class background and family resources permit them to devote their time to their studies. Creative apitude and ability are not sorted by class and economic level. Declining accessibility means that a large percentage of the generation who are now children and youth will not be able to realize their creative capacity. Canadian society is the net loser.
Posted July 11, 2000