Having taken your class last year, I must admit I had a hard time understanding why you stressed the importance of a creative environment so much, and especially that of having a creative workspace.

The rational part of me was always kicking back this idea that “nice colors on the wall won’t make me more creative”. I was so right… and I was also so wrong!

Now having joined an innovation team, we are facing an issue of relocating our offices. Funny how much the term “creative space” came into the discussion as a way to select buildings. But even funnier was how difficult it was for people to define it.

Having thought this true in this situation, I believe it all comes down to an environment that encourages natural crative abrasion and creative collaboration. It’s not really about the colors, nor is it about having a beautiful lofty warehouse conversion.

It’s rather about putting together a place that encourages people to talk together, exchange ideas, understand what neighbours are working on, putting loads of creative stimulus in place (magazines, random objects, walls for hanging out post-it notes, tools for rapid prototyping and experimentation, etc).

As a wise man once said: “If you have one apple and I have one apple. If we both exchange our apples, we will still have one apple each. But if I have an idea and you have an idea. ANd if we both exchange our ideas, we will both end up with two ideas each.”

The same article also talks about the failure of other western super internet companies such as Amazon (falling behind to dang dang) and ebay who lost out to taobao. Is it the case that colloboration culture needs to extend beyond the culture of the company and needs to understand the culture of the country in which it is trying to work in? Is it the case that working across international cultures in the context of a ‘corporate creative culture’ means a product is not innovative enough to cater for individual country cultures because it is too generic?