Peter Bromhead: Rallying call for the 'creatively innovative'

Cartoon / Peter Bromhead

A wearisome disadvantage of turning into a fossil is that I'm frequently invited to join "think tank" public-speaking panels, based on the misguided premise that I may be able to contribute a thimble-full of enlightenment to events under discussion.

Recently I attended an international seminar on "creative innovation in industry". This week it was a panel discussion on consumer design, held in the waterfront "Cloud" - a venue I'd avoided, believing it to be simply a shrine for rugby devotees and holding little curiosity for wimps such as myself.

There appears to be considerable interest in the term "creative innovation" at the moment.

It's a bit of a buzzword, trembling on the brink of becoming a hackneyed euphemism for what were once simply described as "ideas".

From the Prime Minister down, the rallying call to the nation is that we need to be more "creatively innovative" in our industrial pursuits, to keep up with a world thirsty for new consumer product.

I believe that New Zealand does a pretty good job of this for a country with a micro-population.

The collective economic growth of Fonterra and the rural sector is an outstanding example, and on the tourist circuit, the expansion in "extreme" adventure activities such as throwing yourself off a cliff tied to a rubber band suggests - in a rugged sort of way - that the country can show plenty of originality in creative thinking.

Analysing creativity in theoretical discussion tends to be fraught with the same difficulties as explaining a cartoon caption to mystified onlookers.

The humorous message has long disappeared down the plughole if the viewer doesn't get it in the first place.

Dwelling on this matter, I recently found myself on a panel being subjected to a boring dissertation on the process of creativity from a fellow academic.

He peppered his lecture with a sprinkling of spatial metaphors and Gestalt psychology, suggesting this is the matrix that drives invention.

The paradox was that while the audience struggled to follow the panelist's sonorous waffle, I was slaving at the coal-face, processing creativity as he spoke.

I appeared to be studiously writing notes on stage next to him, but was in fact frantically drawing a cartoon to send back to a local newspaper.

And I was not inspired, I should hastily add, by Gestalt psychology or esoteric thinking, but by an old-fashioned device we have in the media industry - called a deadline.