What is creative confidence?

At its core, creative confidence is the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out. As children, each of us had a certain level of our own creative confidence baked into our identities and behaviours. Unfortunately, many of us have since lost it or pushed it away – fearing that either we weren’t any good at being creative or that someone else was better. Maybe it was a parent who pushed you to focus on math or science instead of art. Maybe it was a classmate who laughed at your off-the-wall idea. Maybe it was your own fear of failure, or fear of being judged by others, that stopped you before you even tried. Whatever the cause, that moment – the point in time when a child or teenager chooses to either sweep aside his or her own creative potential or recommit to nurturing it – is what our challenge is all about.
– (from http://www.openideo.com/open/creative-confidence/brief.html)

What is the challenge?

Introducing OpenIDEO’s Creative Confidence Challenge from IDEO on Vimeo.

How might we inspire and support teens and young adults to continue practicing and to preserve their creative confidence? How might we anticipate that pivotal moment when a young person is faced with a crisis of creative confidence and help them navigate successfully to the other side? And if creative confidence is like a muscle that can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and experience, how might we encourage young people to flex these muscles, hone these skills and carry their creative confidence proudly with them in school and in life?

How does OpenIDEO work?

How will we work on this project?

We will work collaboratively on this project in class and through this blog. We will have one account on the OpenIDEO site for the project that I will manage to post submissions of our work to the larger Challenge community and to comment on other participant’s work.

David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence