THE IDEA FOR CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB
The genesis of The CreativeCoffee Club started a year ago at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, when Toby Moores met David Tebbutt and I.  Subsequently Toby talked us both in to joining him in writing a book about capturing commercial creativity, based on ideas he had developed within his company Sleepydog, and through his work at De Montfort University.  The book is still "work in progress" but we've been discussing the topic regularly ever since.  We had been thinking about blogging our ideas, and we've been talking about  creativity to people at networking events and meetups, like the OpenCoffee Club in London.  It became logical to think about  starting a creativity based networking event of our own, linked to a community website where we could bring together like minded people to discuss the topic, both face to face and online.  

WHY SHOULD WE BE FOCUSSING ON CREATIVITY?
We believe our education system needs radical change.  It was designed in the 19th century to produce workers for an industrial age, but now we live in the very different world of the 21st century and an information age of amazing opportunities.  We may be producing more and more high quality graduates to enter the workforce, but if that is all we are doing to compete in the global economy, then we will fail.  India and China can produce just as good quality graduates, but at 20% of our costs.  Here in the UK, or in the US, or elsewhere in the West we have to compete in a different way, and we believe creativity, innovation and better ideas are the keys to improving our performance - but our school systems stifle creativity rather than making it flourish.  Sir Ken Robinson's superb and highly entertaining TED Talk from 2006 explains why much better than we could:

In our schools we regularly teach study skills, but we rarely teach thinking skills.  Why is that?  Towards the end of Sir Ken's speech he says:

"I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology.  One in which we start to reconstitute our perception of the richness of human capacity.  Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we've strip mined the earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won't serve us.  We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

We would add that those principles need to follow through in to the world of work, so that creativity becomes part of the normal process - a natural part of the organisation's "DNA".

WHAT IS CREATIVECOFFEE CLUB?
CreativeCoffee Club is being organized by Toby Moores, Sue Thomas, Stephen Brown, David Tebbutt and David Terrar, in conjunction with De Montfort University and the Institute of Creative Technologies.  We are sure that more people will become involved, and we hope to build a community across the worlds of business and academia that is interested in helping people and organizations be more creative.  Our objective is to:

○ Work to change the way we are educating our children
○ Encourage public and private organisations to make creativity a natural part of their day to day processes.

We will have regular meetings, either fortnightly or monthly, alternating between London and Leicester, and in other locations when appropriate.  Like the OpenCoffee Club we'll meet from 10:00 to 12:00 on a weekday, but make sure that it is somewhere that you can get good coffee!  We'll use this site to publicise the meetings and what we are doing, but also to engage the community so that they can help shape the way this develops.  If we can help facilitate groups in other countries that start their own meetings, but connect with us here, then that would be great too.  You can get to the site at creativecoffeeclub.com (or creativitycoffeeclub.com).  We intend to publish our ideas here, link to relevant material, and to create a resource that will help anyone who is interested in creativity and innovation.