What does ‘Mr. Creativity’ advise young people to learn?

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13:39

The theme of this year's Summer Davos was "Shaping Innovative Societies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution", and an innovative society needs a teachable and learnable education model related to innovation, as well as talents with edge-making skills, according to John Kao, founder of Edgemakers and a WEF adviser on innovation.

“If you want innovation, you need people who know how to do it; if you want people who know how to do it, you have to help them learn how to do it. So I spent 30 years on working through some the basic questions about ‘how do you actually make innovation teachable and learnable?'” Kao said.

Kao is an innovation guru described as “Mr. Creativity” by The Economist. Kao said the creativity is the “sweet spot” between rules and freedoms. From his perspective, everyone is full of creativity, but many of them don't know that “their creativities can be shaped and amplified.”

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There is a misconception that creativity is throwing the rules away. “You measure what's easy to measure. So you take a math test and you get 96, you are good. And this is the industrial model of education where we want to give people scores so that we know where to place them with objective skills.”

Kao advised young people to learn “edge-making skills” which will be significant for them in the future. As to a hot debate on whether artificial intelligence (AI) kills jobs or create more work, “the real answer is nobody knows,” he said, adding that “it's obvious that lots of jobs are going to be destroyed and a lot of new jobs are going to be created.”

“Computers cannot show empathy. They don't have imagination. And they don't have emotional intelligence to look at human beings and figure out what's going on in their minds,” Kao commented, noting that AI, machinery learning and digital environment actually create “a different kind of place base for human beings to exercise imaginations and leverage our native creativities to do amazing things.”