"...creativity and innovation have major implications for public policy. Most significant are the implications for education systems..." - to a certain point, but I am not sure we can order creativity into existence in some kind of Goethean will to power, people are either creative or they are not.
"A major tendency of academe in the past 50 years has been increasing specialisation and therefore increasing expertise in ever-narrower fields" - pure research by universities leads to the greatest amount of innovation, rather than chasing all sorts of leads that subsequently turn out to be dead ends.
"True breakthroughs and large stepchanges will take precedence and need to be rewarded accordingly" - and also subjected to democratic control as we cannot tolerate innovations such as GM food that are pushed through against the will of the majority.
"...the Pacific Asia region is at the forefront of urbanisation and is likely to continue to lead the way. By 2030, over 60 per cent of China’s population will live in cities..." -this is very interesting as presumably we can expect in the next twenty years or so an anti-urban reaction and intense nostalgia for a pre-urban pre-industrial China profound (with Sino pre-raphaelites, Sino bucolic poetry, a Sino wandervogel movement etc).
"...the bigger the city, the greater its power to drive innovation" - not sure this is true, Vienna in 1900 had a population of 2 million and produced "Freud, Mahler, Mach, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Herzl, Trotsky forged the world we know today - a meeting point of individualism and collectivism, of egotism and idealism, the erotic and the ascetic, the elevated and the debased" (Lebrecht) but these were individuals, and it is not sure whether their creativity streamed from the size of the city, the geographic location in the heart of Europe, the psychological security of the Habsburg monarchy, or any number of different factors. To ascribe the brilliance of 1900 Vienna to the size of the city seems an over-simplification.
"A major tendency of academe in the past 50 years has been increasing specialisation and therefore increasing expertise in ever-narrower fields" - pure research by universities leads to the greatest amount of innovation, rather than chasing all sorts of leads that subsequently turn out to be dead ends.
"True breakthroughs and large stepchanges will take precedence and need to be rewarded accordingly" - and also subjected to democratic control as we cannot tolerate innovations such as GM food that are pushed through against the will of the majority.
"...the Pacific Asia region is at the forefront of urbanisation and is likely to continue to lead the way. By 2030, over 60 per cent of China’s population will live in cities..." -this is very interesting as presumably we can expect in the next twenty years or so an anti-urban reaction and intense nostalgia for a pre-urban pre-industrial China profound (with Sino pre-raphaelites, Sino bucolic poetry, a Sino wandervogel movement etc).
"...the bigger the city, the greater its power to drive innovation" - not sure this is true, Vienna in 1900 had a population of 2 million and produced "Freud, Mahler, Mach, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Herzl, Trotsky forged the world we know today - a meeting point of individualism and collectivism, of egotism and idealism, the erotic and the ascetic, the elevated and the debased" (Lebrecht) but these were individuals, and it is not sure whether their creativity streamed from the size of the city, the geographic location in the heart of Europe, the psychological security of the Habsburg monarchy, or any number of different factors. To ascribe the brilliance of 1900 Vienna to the size of the city seems an over-simplification.
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