CREATIVITY = INNOVATIVITY

Knowledge is good. Creativity is good. Knowledge is not the same as creativity. If you talk about a society's need for creativity - for example within innovation strategies - one must be clear on the main difference between academic knowledge and innovative creativity. The former is the talent to memorize something existing. The latter is the ability and craft to create something not yet existing. These two talents are basically diametrically opposed.

To be educated up to a certain level of knowledge or expertise in an area is something completely different from creating a new area of knowledge. The latter is what the creative talent is about. Often completely outside academic education.

Creativity is what generates the knowledge of the future - which eventually then will recycle as the future study plans on all levels of education.

Several researchers in neuroscience report an approximate 5% share of serially creative individuals in a population.

The serially creative is not a group enhancing their skills from study instructions, special support in natural sciences or mathematics etc. On the contrary. Serially creative individuals are rather in fact incompatible with the actual idea of traditional teaching. Their raison d'étre is not to document and assimilate facts about what is and has been, their personality is about generating what will be tomorrows science, whether in music studios, laboratories, design companies, computer games companies, etc.

When discussing "creative companies," one might conceive that the business form itself is creative. Or that the shareholders, CEO or management is creative. There are no creative companies. On the other hand, there are companies that, through their work environment, employment terms, business concept, etc., attract the serially creative individuals to work there.

Misleading is also the misconception that it is the education at the municipal music school that has produced musical geniuses such as Benny Andersson and Max Martin (21-fold Billboard Holder of the 1st Place), while in fact Max and Benny are representatives for those approximately 5% serially creative within, in this case, the area of ​​music. The municipal music school is not the reason for the Swedish music base, it just happens to be an example of one of many necessary supportive environments for serially creative.

Sweden's creative industries are certainly the ones placing Sweden on the world map: within the international music industry, computer games industry, clothing design, film production, innovation, etc.
The PR value obviously affects foreign investors and industries positively.

If the Swedish society as a whole identified our 5% share of the serially creative already in school, all parts of society would find a tremendous source of growth, today more or less unexploited.

What is significant for the serially creative is an exceptionally developed ability to solve problems, from seemingly incompatible units, finding bridges and connections, realizing new methods and systems to optimize everything from traffic solutions to carbon dioxide elimination to new music, to new business ideas such as Skype or Spotify.

Sweden's educational system has not yet been fully discussed in holistic terms; reformatively analyzed on the ultimate purpose of 'education'.
Is the main purpose to deliver skilled labor to business and industry? Is the purpose achieving a high public education of the population? Is the purpose setting Sweden on the map as a spearhead in research? Is the purpose to generate democratic, reasonably satisfied residents with a stable moral compass?
Is the purpose even the same today as 100 years ago? 25 years ago?
 

Or could the purpose of education be to optimize every citizen's utmost potential to contribute, in all areas of society, to the best a human mind can perform?

If the last sentence is the answer, then the education system needs to be fundamentally reformed. "Learning" can no longer be the primary method of developing citizens. Schools must be able to manage and stimulate what can not really be taught; subjects, skills and qualities lacking the form of transferable 'facts'. The Swedish education system needs to adapt to this, to prevent losing the unprecedented social potential that the serially creative are, now and in the future.

Who knows? Perhaps Sweden may then channel many of the 165,000 young people today who are neither in education or work, but probably are - to a large extent - serially creative.