Creativity Community

Home
United States
Miami, FL
Creativity Community

Directions Website Contact the organization

Where creativity meets leadership, entrepreneurship, and the science of building what's possible.

Hosted by Dr. Claude Kershner — professor, consultant, and builder. The Creativity Community is the Facebook home of The Dr. Claude Kershner Show — a space for students, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and leaders exploring the intersection of creativity, economics, AI, and the future of business. Join the conversation and catch new episodes at thedrclaudekershnershow.com.

10/14/2026

AI came up with better-rated product ideas than MBA students. Then it started repeating itself.

Researchers at Wharton, Cornell and WHU (Terwiesch, Mollick and colleagues, accepted July 2026) compared 200 student ideas for products under $50 with 200 from GPT-4. Raters' purchase intent averaged 40% for the humans and 46 to 49% for AI. Of the top 10% of ideas, only 5 were human.

But the humans' ideas were slightly more novel, and AI ideas were more alike across all 32 comparisons in their meta-analysis. A thousand AI ideas still left corners of the idea space untouched.

What helped? Random personas, built-in constraints, and letting a human choose the problem while AI generates the solutions.

Caveat: one market (college students), GPT-4-era models, and ideas judged as text.

My read: AI is a fast, tireless generator. Diversity, and deciding which problem matters, is still a human design choice. The next frontier of creative work may be asking better, stranger questions.

What constraint could you hand your team, or your AI, tomorrow to get stranger ideas?

09/30/2026

Fifteen hours of design thinking made a group of students measurably more creative. It did not make them want to start a business.

A July 2026 study in The International Journal of Management Education followed 33 students in a game design course at a Hong Kong university. Working in seven teams, they used scenario-based design thinking, with AI acting as technical assistant, resource navigator and co-creative partner.

Creativity scores rose significantly (p = 0.008). Students also reported a stronger entrepreneurial identity and more entrepreneurial competencies. But entrepreneurial intention and mindset moved far less.

This is a small, single-course study, so hold it loosely. Still, it names something worth noticing: capability and willingness are different things. We can teach people to generate and test ideas. Whether they step forward and act on one is a separate design problem, and I'd guess it has more to do with permission, stakes and belonging.

The immersive scenarios did the most for identity, which fits the idea that we become what we rehearse. So if you lead a classroom or a team, give the skill a real scenario, a real audience and a real next step, not only a workshop and a certificate.

Where have you seen skill without the nerve to use it, and what finally unlocked it?

09/24/2026

We usually talk about creativity as a talent for making things. A study in npj Science of Learning suggests it is also a talent for learning things.

Researchers led by Simone Luchini and Roger Beaty at Penn State ran two studies with about 290 students. Each person memorized unfamiliar word pairs and was tested 24 hours later. Each also took a word association test: given a noun like "boot," come up with a verb. "Wear" is the obvious answer. "Travel" is the distant one.

Students who reached for more distant connections remembered more, even after controlling for intelligence. In fact, associative thinking fully explained the link between creativity and learning.

Here is the part I love. Only deliberate associations predicted learning. Saying whatever came to mind did not. Being asked to be creative on purpose did.

For founders and teams, that is a practical invitation. When you walk into a new market, a new tool, or a new customer problem, don't only ask "what is this like?" Ask "what is the least obvious thing this connects to?" A skid steer parked beside the ocean is a strange pairing. Strange pairings are how the mind files new knowledge where it can find it again.

Creativity is partly a trait. It is also a way of paying attention that you can choose.

What is the most unexpected connection that ever helped you learn something new?

09/17/2026

Six in ten workers describe themselves as strongly curious. Only three in ten say their workplace strongly rewards it.

That gap is the headline of the State of Curiosity 2026 report (SurveyMonkey, 1,925 U.S. workers, April 2026), and it changes how I think about creativity in organizations. We keep trying to make people more creative. Most already are. What they are missing is permission.

Four in ten admitted they pretended to understand something rather than ask. Only 38% of meetings are open discussion; in cultures that discourage questions it drops to 15%. In those cultures, 41% feel safe asking a question. Where questions are encouraged, 94% do.

The most-requested fix was not training or tools. More than three-quarters simply wanted more chances to brainstorm with colleagues. Cheapest intervention in the report.

A peer-reviewed study (Cogent Social Sciences, 2025) found the same mechanism from the leader's side: a leader's visible curiosity, with psychological safety and psychological capital, explained nearly half the variance in employees' creative performance. You do not have to be the most creative person in the room. You have to be the most visibly curious one.

One more: leaders now route questions to AI at nearly three times the rate of their teams. Every question sent to a chatbot instead of a colleague is one less moment where someone sees that asking is safe.

When was the last time you asked a question in a meeting you were supposed to already know the answer to?

09/15/2026

Pay people for ideas and you will get more ideas, right? A study in this month's Harvard Business Review says the answer is stranger than that.

Researchers tracked 2,376 inventor-years at publicly listed firms in China after those companies introduced cash rewards for inventions. The reward did not simply raise output. It changed the kind of output, depending on who received it.

Specialists, people whose careers run deep in one technical field, responded by producing fewer inventions, but ones that were more novel and technically significant. Generalists, whose work spans several domains, responded by producing more inventions, faster.

Same incentive. Two completely different creative responses.

This fits what motivation research has argued for decades: rewards do not add creativity, they steer it. A cash bonus tells a specialist "make this one count" and tells a generalist "keep them coming." Neither is wrong. The mistake is assuming one dial moves everybody the same way.

For an entrepreneur or a team lead, the practical question is not "should I reward ideas" but "what mix of depth and breadth do I have, and what am I asking each of them to optimize for?"

If you want breakthroughs, protect your specialists' time. If you want a steady stream, unleash the generalists.

Which one are you, and does your reward system know it?

09/10/2026

The largest creativity test ever run put more than 100,000 people up against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and friends. The AI beat the average human.

That's the headline. The finding underneath it is more useful.

The study (Bellemare-Pépin, Lespinasse, Olson, Bengio, Jerbi and colleagues, Scientific Reports, January 2026) used the Divergent Association Task: name ten words as unrelated as possible. Simple, fast, and strongly correlated with real creative work. On that task, GPT-4 and others outscored the typical person. Then the researchers looked at the most creative half of the humans. Their average beat every model tested. Among the top ten percent, the gap widened further, and it held up on haiku, plot summaries and short stories.

Two details matter for anyone leading a team. First, AI creativity wasn't fixed. Raise the "temperature" or prompt it to play with word origins and the scores climbed. The machine's originality was a function of human direction. Second, "the most creative half" isn't a genetic elite. Divergent thinking is trainable, and most of the people in your building have never been trained.

So the competitive question isn't human versus machine. It's whether your organization is building people who sit above the line the machine just crossed.

What are you doing, on purpose, to move your team into the top half?

09/03/2026

The most rigorously tested creativity tool of 2026 has no login, no subscription and no prompt box. It's a walk.

A meta-analysis published in PLoS One this spring pooled 23 studies and 1,036 participants to ask a simple question: does walking change how we think creatively?

The answer was large and specific. Walking produced a big jump in divergent thinking, the ability to generate many novel, useful ideas (effect size d = 0.93, which in plain terms means walkers routinely out-idea sitters). It did nothing measurable for convergent thinking, the ability to narrow down and pick the best answer.

That split is the useful part. Walking isn't a general brain upgrade. It's an idea-generation upgrade.

Design thinking has always asked us to diverge before we converge. This research tells us where to do each. Widen the field on foot. Narrow it at the table.

So the next time your team books a "brainstorm" in a conference room, consider taking the first twenty minutes outside, then coming back in to decide. Same people, same problem, different sequence.

Where did your last good idea actually show up: at a desk, or on the move?

09/02/2026

Your first great idea probably wasn't finished when you had it. Someone at your kitchen table finished it with you.

A 2026 study in the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences followed 30 technology entrepreneurs and, unusually, 11 people from their inner circles through the earliest stage of idea development. The finding: the creative work of a new venture doesn't happen inside one head. Founders leaned on a small set of trusted people who did two things at once. They supported the idea, and they challenged it. Those conversations modified, clarified and sharpened the ideas before any customer, investor or co-founder ever heard them.

That's a twist on classic network research. We've long credited weak ties with bringing novelty. Here it was strong ties, a spouse, a college friend, a parent, providing the safety to say a half-formed thing out loud and the honesty to push back on it.

Most ideation frameworks skip this stage. Design thinking starts at empathy for the user. But before that there's a quieter loop: a founder testing a rough idea on people who care enough to be honest.

I wrote a chapter on creativity and innovation in Deemed Essential (deemedessential.org), and this is the part I'd add today: protect your circle. Then ask who gets to be that circle for the people you lead.

Who is the first person you run your half-baked ideas past?

08/26/2026

We teach creativity like it's a thinking skill. New evidence says it's also a feeling skill.

A 2026 study in Frontiers in Psychology examined design-thinking-based entrepreneurship education through control-value theory — the framework psychologists use to explain how emotions shape learning. The finding: emotional engagement mediates the link between design thinking and the competencies we actually care about — innovation and interpersonal skill. Students didn't grow creative competence just by learning empathize-define-ideate-prototype-test. They grew it when the process made them feel something: curiosity, pride, even productive frustration.

That matches what practitioners see every day. Hand a team a whiteboard and a framework, and you get compliance. Put them face-to-face with a real person struggling with a real problem, and the ideas change texture entirely.

A practical takeaway for anyone leading ideation: before asking "is our process right?", ask "does anyone in this room feel anything?" Real users, real stakes, visible progress. Emotion is the engine; method is just the steering.

When was the last time work made you feel something strong enough to create from?

08/25/2026

Your best ideas don't show up while you're working on the problem. Science has a good explanation for why.

Researchers call it incubation. In a recent Scientific Reports study, people who stepped away from a creative writing task and let their minds wander came back measurably more creative — and the benefit was specific to mind wandering, not just any break. Earlier work dubbed it the "shower effect": moderately engaging activities — walking, showering, tending something with your hands — beat both hard focus and total idleness, because they occupy just enough attention to let ideas recombine underneath.

Here's the uncomfortable 2026 twist: researchers now warn that constant stimulation is crowding out exactly this state. Every gap in the day gets filled with a screen, and the brain's default mode network — where incubation lives — never gets the room.

So the practical discipline isn't another brainstorm on the calendar. It's protected wandering: define the problem sharply, work it hard, then deliberately leave it and move — no podcast, no feed. Entrepreneurs I teach are often shocked that the "unproductive" walk was the most productive hour of the week.

When was the last time a real breakthrough hit you mid-task — versus in the shower, the car, or the walk afterward?

Address

Miami, FL

Website

https://thedrclaudekershnershow.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Creativity Community posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to Creativity Community:

Want your organization to be the top-listed non profit organization in Miami?