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Articles and thoughts on strategic foresight.

About creativity - why Mycelium Creative Studio became Mycelium Foresight Studio

When I started to structure my future-oriented activities, I set up a company. Initially it was called Mycelium Creative Studio. The metaphor of the mycelium is still valid a few years later and is even becoming more apt. On the other hand, the word 'creative' seemed less and less appropriate. One day I read "What if we unleashed our imaginations to create the future we want" by Rob Hopkins. Here is a passage from it. It finally made me change my mind - I knew why creativity is not the right word.

Creativity takes imagination and gives it form, turning it into something tangible, but it also comes with certain constraints. As Royal Holloway (University of London) researcher Oli Mould writes in his book Against Creativity, "the dominant narrative of creativity boils down to reproducing the same things over and over again. Contemporary capitalism has appropriated creativity to ensure its own growth and to maintain the centralisation and monetisation of what it produces".

Ursula Le Guin speaks of this phenomenon in similar terms: "In the marketplace, the word creativity today means the production of ideas applicable to practical strategies in order to generate greater profits. This semantic restriction is so advanced that the word creative could hardly be further degraded. I don't use it anymore I've given it up to the capitalists and academics to abuse as they please. But they will not have the word imagination..." From this degradation, one easily passes to innovation, which consists in making imagination and creativity into products that can be commercialized, patented and registered.

Source for the quote by Ursula Le Guin - the operating instructions in The wave in the mind talks and essays on the writer the reader and imagination. Shambhala, 2004, p. 207