Amy Whitaker is the author of "Art Thinking." She will speak as part of the Inside Creativity track at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Find more blogs from Festival speakers on our website. Below is an excerpt from Amy's post.

 

I believe everyone is an artist, and that creativity is a basic human birthright. We also live in the largest, most complex market economy of all time. Creativity and commerce are connected within each of us. We are all artists of our own lives, but we also have to live in a practical world based on price and value. In the workplace, creativity and commerce are inextricably tied. Joseph Schumpeter argued in 1942 for what he called “creative destruction”—the idea that change is the nature of business. Refusing to change leads to stagnation. Instead, creativity—in the form of bravely moving past or even destroying previous success—is the only way to pursue long-term value creation. Microeconomics has a similar storyline: innovate to make profits and then over time, those margins get competed away; innovate again to make more profits.

 

The problem is that culturally, we lack language to talk about this middle space between creativity and commerce. Read more from Amy Whitaker’s blog.

 

Check out our initial speaker list for Aspen Ideas and Spotlight Health. We're adding more names daily!