The 19th of April was World Creativity and Innovation Day. For those unfamiliar with this day, it is a time celebrated by the United Nations to raise awareness for the role that Creativity and Innovation holds for sustainable human development and problem-solving.
To celebrate this, Open Lens Media staff have written about what Creativity and Innovation mean to them...
Rima:
World Creativity and Innovation Day is an opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of creativity and innovation in solving global challenges, improving the quality of life, pushing social development, and driving economic growth across the world. To me, creativity and innovation tie together nicely as creativity means to generate original ideas, whilst innovation arises when using these original ideas to produce something new.
Creativity and innovation is an absolute must in my job as a Digital Content Creator and Marketer (the word ‘Creator’ is in my job title!). I am responsible for designing and producing content for our online platforms including our social media accounts, email newsletters, and website (check out our newly designed website that re-launched recently!)
As the world is becoming increasingly digital, creativity and innovation are essential in my work to be able to stand out in a crowded digital landscape and to capture our audience’s attention with content that engages and resonates with them. With the rapid advancement of technology, I have to be continuously adapting and innovating in order to keep up with the latest online trends and technology changes.
Taran:
Being creative and expressing myself is when I feel most free and innovative with my ideas. Making my own projects such as short films and music videos has allowed me to connect with other creatives and communicate my ideas to a wider crew. I believe that feeding this back into my job role has led to forming better working relationships and gaining a greater understanding of my purpose within a team environment.
Josh:
Creativity to me is a necessity. It is a muscle that needs to be exercised, it’s a skill you can never perfect. Innovation is like evolution. It is improving on the previous. Creativity and innovation isn’t just to do with the arts. It is in almost everything; business, sports, public speaking, education, science, the list goes on and on. Creativity and Innovation are two of the core skills within problem solving and problem solving is an extremely useful transferable skill to have.
Within my job I am often creating. This could be the creation of videos, presentations and/or ideas. Often with a video edit I will create a first draft, I’ll go through the piece and pick out the areas where I can improve and then using those notes I will fix the problems and create a second draft. This process is repeated until I am happy with my final product. It is a back and forth relationship between creation and innovation.
Creativity is essential to everything I do in my role. In leadership I believe it's important to be able to visualise what you want to see and have the innovative thinking to be able to create your vision. I have many responsibilities on a day to day basis and creativity plays into them all. As the CEO I am often thinking about how we can be better at what we do and so innovation plays a huge part in that area too, as it causes me to think about better ways we can do what we do best to continue delivering to a high standard.
Creativity, to me, means expression! It’s the core of innovation which allows for the communication and transformation of ideas into a reality. Creativity is essential for the work we do here at Open Lens as we are committed to supporting young people to embrace their own creative thinking, self-expression and entrepreneurship.
