The Creativity Conference will open its virtual doors to the public from 3 to 5 October. The event has regularly hosted some of the world’s most prolific thinkers and visionaries across emerging technologies.
This has included extended reality (XR), building information modelling (BIM), global telecommunications, and artificial intelligence (AI). However, the event also delves into verticals like music, education, art, and architecture.
With the current iteration of the conference underway, many of the enterprise and XR-focused guests from the speakers’ lineup will share their profound thoughts with XR Today.
To gain a clearer perspective on the aims of the premier event, XR Today is honoured to interview Maxim Jago, Chief Executive and Conference Director, Creativity Conference.
He is a futurist, filmmaker, and author exploring the intersection of creativity and technology, and has hosted and joined vital panel talks on the direction of immersive technologies across the industry.
XR Today: What was the purpose of launching the Creativity Conference? How did it all begin?
Maxim Jago: I founded The Creativity Conference to provide a special environment where creative minds can share ideas, inspire and become inspired, and form new creative collaborations with like-minded people.
I suppose the brief we give to our speakers sets The Creativity Conference apart. We ask our speakers not to speak about techniques, technology, workflows, business skills, business branding, business development, social issues, legal issues, or anything that might outline on a numbered list of steps — like a tutorial.
Instead, we invite our speakers to speak about their joy, and what inspires them so profoundly that they are compelled to create something truly new. Then, we invited them to share how they achieved it by giving their audiences practical, actionable, and specific advice.
The result is that audiences are enabled by listening and learning. They are empowered and can create – and perhaps, I hope, more realistic about who and what they are. I hope people will be less at war with themselves and more in love with being alive.
XR Today: What is the XR enterprise focus for the event? What knowledge do many of your XR speakers wish to share with your audiences?
We have phenomenal speakers working in the XR space, and I expect they will all want to share practical, actionable approaches to XR projects.
For example, Sami Tauber, Founder and CEO, VNCCII, is world-building with Unreal Engine and presents practical approaches to important processes like branding, human-centric experiences, and collaboration.
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Paul Doherty, President and CEO, The Digit Group, a main lead in the development of the trillion-dollar smart city, The Line, works closely with XR projects at a large scale.
Amy Peck, Founder and CEO, EndeavorXR, a well-known global XR thought leader, shares insights on bleeding-edge technologies and their potential practical uses. Also, Mike Pell, Director, The Microsoft Garage – NYC, has a profoundly impactful perspective on the visualisation of dynamic businesses. The list goes on.
XR Today: Your conference focuses on sharing “real-world practical, actionable, specific advice.” Could you explain this a bit further?
We walk the line between high-level, forward-thinking thought leadership and practical day-to-day knowledge.
By avoiding step-by-step tutorials and workshops, we allow our speakers to focus more on practical, creative action principles.
This advice could be as simple as ‘stay hydrated,’ which impacts brain function, memory creation, and stress, or as subtle as exploring the best emotional states for creative thinking and how to achieve them.
The goal is to empower and enable our attendees to stride forward with their own creative projects, whether those projects are classically creative, like painting a picture or writing a song, or more broadly creative, like forming a new company or designing a school curriculum.
XR Today: Why is creativity a metric that helps to ensure ROI on XR solutions?
My working definition for ‘creativity’ is ‘any intentional decision’. To be able to make an intentional decision, it’s first necessary to embrace what is real. This can be difficult because we tend to filter our experience through judgement or, worst of all, self-judgement.
Once reality is found or approximated, the next step is to make decisions about the future of that reality. After this, it’s a question of taking dynamic action to achieve the future.
You may not get the outcome you expect, but you will have participated in the formation of the future. In this important way, you are actively participating in your own life, rather than passively accepting it happening to you.
This active participation is crucial for the development of new technologies, products and services. In the modern world, remaining genuinely committed to knowing what is real is akin to a superpower.
This is why enterprise-scale organisations invest so heavily in big data analytics. Without clarity and focus, you might be shooting in the dark.
Beyond this special type of clarity, creative thinking thrives on active and engaged collaboration, experimentation, and the novel synthesis of disparate technologies and paradigms. There is a wisdom in creative thinking that AI cannot (yet) replicate – and it impacts every stage in the lifecycle of a novel technology.
XR Today: Why have you chosen to host this event regularly in Iceland?
This year, we are hosting The Creativity Conference using Zoom meetings, rather than through webinars, so our more than 70 speakers can see and hear their audiences.
Next year, we plan to host in person in the extraordinary landscape offered by Iceland. There is something truly unique and wonderful about the atmosphere, and apart from being stunning, there is a strong creative tradition.
Most Icelanders speak excellent English, which is great for an international audience. Additionally, the country is number one in the global peace index for most peaceful countries, flights from North America and Western Europe are relatively short, and there’s great internet connectivity across the country.
We plan to host conferences in Iceland, Dubai, and Tokyo, along with our regular ones in New York. This way, we can bring new ideas about creative thinking and ways to be more impactful to the West, Middle East, and Far East.
For more information, kindly visit https://www.creativityconference.is/
