We live in perhaps the most creative and serious moment in human history.
We live in an “era of abundance, but still carry the mentality of scarcity”. We are able to acknowledge the complexity of the world and also have the tools, the power and the desire to handle it.
This complex world is born out of unprecedented connectivity, growing information flow, diversity coupled with the prospect of unity, and a chaos that can lead us to disintegration or to the discovery of patterns that we could not see before.
We hurry.
We must hurry to preserve the planet, hurry to avoid further wars, rush to find conditions for the expression of individual power at work, leaving aside the terrible paradigm of pain as something that elevates the human being. We want to carry a certain smile behind what we do, not denying pain, but knowing that pain is a state that can pass through us like the water from a river that knows its own destiny.
Love and pain, power and collaboration, we have no more time for plain oppositions,we want mixtures. We hurry.
Through the computer screen we seek good encounters. We desire to touch those who share the same vibe: it’s possible to love life without being too innocent.We can use all the technical, scientific and cognitive conquers in composition with the joyful, urgent and practical dictates of the so said Generation Y. In Y we have choices.
The desire of these new combinations will then inhabiting projects: striking actions, which pervade the world based on open listening and the contemplation of complex maps. Old ways don´t disappear by collapse, but because they become obsolete.
Wherever you are and whom you can talk to, you´ll hear the same story. We want a life that has meaning. Hidden under the tables in business meetings, stretched out on bar counters and on the drawings made by coaches and pupils, lies a project perspective that will enable the emergence of a new world. It is to these projects that we want to devote our energies.
We hurry. There never was so much inspiration and so many “loose” people in search of good agency that helps them to exert their power. There has never been so much pressure to melt together our knowledge, catalyzing authorless innovations that are born in “between”, born in relationships, but with collective authority and resources. Virtual and action collapse.
Innovation can then seem a magic word, a contemporary holy grail that everyone wants, but nobody knows where it is. It is so because innovation is the possibility that inhabits the present, it is the Zeitgeist, is all over the place for those who have eyes to see, ears to listen and desire to perform. To innovate is to make relevant changes to and from the networks we inhabit. It is a way of living in which an expanded and elusive present challenges us to act with consistency and to amplify the generation of value. Where cities, schools and organizations need an accurate acupuncture for small points of light to gain strength and overshadow what consumes us (and what we consume).
We live up to what happens to us, if we’re up to the present events.
All economy can be creative.
(this post was based on the recent events of CICI 2011, international conference of innovative cities, and The Network Society and the Creative Economy Seminar, sponsored by VIVO- in Curitiba and São Paulo respectively; plus infinite readings, links and posts that invade my life every day. It is possibly the most appreciative thing I´ve ever written.)
Ideas to Innovate 