As a Generation Y, I’m actually quite surprised at the lack of creativity amongst my peers. You could argue that, hey, we’re under 30, with many of us just leaving university; what could we have possibly achieved as yet?
Let’s look at the other generations, shall we? Einstein came up with his theory of relativity when he was 26; Darwin had developed his theory of evolution before he was 30; Martin Luther King Jr became a civil rights activist, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he was 26; Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 20; Tim Berners-Lee proposed his concept of hypertext (which led to the invention of the internet) when he was 25; The ‘Google Guys’, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their company when they were 28 and 25, respectively. The list goes on.
Ok, so Generation Y has Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of online community mammoth, Facebook, but that’s it, really. So, what’s going on?
In 1958, Professor E. Paul Torrance designed a series of tasks to test for creativity in children. He also discovered that, like IQ, ‘CQ’ has been rising steadily in children since then. Until the 1990s, where it started to decline and is declining still. This worrying fall in creativity has been blamed on the over-structuring of activities and the prevention of allowing children to fail at school, thus inhibiting opportunities for kids to experiment and learn things for themselves. This over-nurturing of our young is smothering their creative potential, and is terrible news for businesses, which rely on innovation to grow.
Will Generation Y be the first generation (of potentially many) to have few world-changing innovators? Unless parents, schools and government trust their children to work things out for themselves and encourage creative thought, then we may well be building a world where people are too risk-averse to innovate.
