My Creativity Book Tour - Second Stop: Paris, France

Sahid and Imed from IMT, Myself and Ines from Royal Holloway

It was a pleasure to accept the invitation from the Information Systems Department of IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom) Business School to visit them in Paris, and use it to present my book on Managing Creativity.  I was also fortunate to take one of my undergraduate Royal Holloway management students, Ines Boussofara,  to be part of the conversations and activities during this visit. 

IMT staff were very kind, making sure I was looked after at all times. That also included helping us move hotels when reservations for our second night there were missing!.

At my book presentation, it was great to see how my colleague educators and researchers wanted to make something workable and usable of the book ideas. Something to guide information systems researchers or company managers. Perhaps something that could be publishable in a journal article.

Staff members from IMT Business School, Ines and Myself

My answer to this was that the book is an attempt ( a risky one considering pressures to publish journal articles) to bridge gaps between disciplines (creativity, systems thinking).  I added that my proposal to use the systems idea as an inquiring device to help me make sense of my own creativity (which then became two creativities) could be of some use.  I had to say though, and referring to my own research, that in the field or discipline of information systems we have become good at using some ideas as 'front ends' of systems implementation or adoption processes.  In this regard, I wished we could talk to students and to other researchers less about success and more about failure and anti-innovation.  

At IMT creativity means innovation, making ideas happen, making them commercially successful. Students are continuously challenged to work with others from different disciplines, to learn how to do things on the go, to present ideas, to elaborate business plans. This is a valuable form of creativity, one which in management education has taken center stage. It might be useful to see it as a form that could be further enhanced by linking it to creators' inner motivations, a form that if it fails, should not take down creators with them. 

IMT Incubator Hall of Fame

Me talking during the seminar (I was just getting started!) 

During the presentation, it was rightly pointed out by the audience that the ideas of the book, in a way which I did not fully intend, could help us reflect on creativity, its manifestations, how it unfolds in contexts like universities, and how it could become a mere instrument of economic power if we do not pause and reflect.


Another question related to this latter aspect of creativity was about how we could enthuse our management students to think of big ethical questions. This is not only relevant for students in information systems but in all other areas of management. Perhaps by consciously developing our creativity, we could then use systems ideas as tools to help us talk about ethical values and do something about them.


To make this happen, it might be that we need to acknowledge that we as educators and our students pursue limited forms of creativity, those which help us secure employment or give us economic and social benefits in the short term. It was good to know that at IMT they also value mindfulness as an alternative to living our lives in pilot modes.  This commonality, together with possibilities to entice students to think of using their ideas to deal with pressing issues in our societies (i.e. recycling), could help us positively shape the role of education in helping us all to save our planet. 

Ines and myself at the IMT business/technology incubator. Be mindful of the alien!  

Ines made great contributions at the seminar by giving her own examples of how the use of some creativity tools (i.e. de Bono's six hats) and working on 'real' problems (i.e. student ideas for recycling at residences) have enabled her to identify and appreciate different perspectives, and think of new ways of using information technologies to deal with emerging problems.  During our visit, she taught me a lot about her use of social media and mobile technologies.  I could see that she belongs to a new generation of people who make technology part of their daily lives, as perhaps I did many years ago! Maybe it is time for me to learn new things.

I was left curious by other questions related to how some social structures or institutions shape our creativity.  My book has a framework to help make sense of some of these when it comes to collaborate between academics and social organisations.  This idea that the use of systems thinking might not show these structures or institutions keeps popping up when I talk with other academics.  I would still like to think that we have some degree of freedom when deciding to include or marginalize these structures in our creativity efforts.  

Thank you IMT for having me, hope to be there again soon!