Panels

Learning to think and work across disciplines is an important 21st-century skill for organizations and individuals. Creative collaboration within productive teams has been critical for many success stories in our industry, but cultivating cross-disciplinary thinking within an organization is hard to achieve given the traditional tendency to separate the arts and sciences in the culture at large. Creative thinking on the part of an individual can spark invention and lead innovation. The ability to see connections, articulate a vision, and approach old problems from new angles can solve larger intractable challenges or spawn new industries. This panel convenes notable exemplary individuals from industry and academia to share first-hand accounts for how they do what they do and what they see as the most important factors, organizationally and individually, to achieve creative excellence.

The panel's artists, engineers, patent-holders, inventors, and academics reflect on personal experiences to address a variety of questions, personal and grand: How do we set up organizations and interactions to enable creativity to develop and work effectively as creative communities? How do you recognize, assess, and nurture creativity in an individual? What educational experiences best prepare a rising generation to be an innovative and creative workforce? What lessons learned in specific domains might be applied to other problem domains? What, if any, political, cultural, and educational changes would you wish for to facilitate your work? After sharing personal experiences of their own creative processes, panelists respond to attendees’ inquiries in a question-and-answer session.