Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/09/2017 - 09/09/2017
All Day
Location
Palazzo delle Esposizioni
Categories No Categories
Innovations are key factors in the evolution of human societies, since they represent the primary motor to explore new solutions in ever-changing and unpredictable environments. New technological artefacts, scientific discoveries, new social and cultural structures, are very often triggered by mutated external conditions. The detailed mechanisms through which humans and societies express their creativity and innovate are largely unknown but in the last few years a few attempts have been done to establish a comprehensive mathematical framework. Creative solutions, novelties and innovation share an important feature: often, innovative events do not happen by chance, rather they seem to be triggered by some previous novelty or innovation. In studies of biological, technological, and cultural evolution, it has been hypothesized that one innovation can lay the groundwork for another by creating fresh opportunities. In our daily lives, a similar process may account for why one new thing so often leads to another. This idea has been beautifully summarized by the notion of adjacent possible introduced by Stuart Kauffman. In this picture, the advance into the adjacent possible is the driving force for correlating innovative events, and novelties are produced through an exploration of a space ”physical, conceptual, technological or biological” that enlarges itself whenever one reaches a point of the space never touched before. The Kreyon Conference represented the opportunity to assess where we stand by investigating the determinants of innovation processes and their evolution, progressing in their mathematical modelling, understanding their function and identifying the most thriving contexts (institutions, social organizations, business models, etc.) for creativity and innovation. The aim of the Kreyon Conference 2017 was to gather scientists from many different disciplines (physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, social sciences, arts, etc.) to address fundamental questions about how people express their creativity and innovate both at the individual and collective levels. The conference hosted more than forty talks during three days, giving not only the opportunity to listen to many points of view on the subject, but also a space for discussion and comparison between researchers from countries far away from each other. During the conference, Alex Cantarelli hosted a Creative Workshop, his Collaborative Playwriting Workshop, producing a theatrical text that was read during the Kreyon Open Conference.