I'll be participating in a panel on collaborative creativity next month at The American Creativity Association's annual conference, which will be March 22 to 25 in Austin, Texas. The panel will be led by Paul Schumann, a futurist who has been leading a group project to create an Innovation Commons. Also on the panel will be Jon Lebkowsky, Jeff De Cagna, Mark Fox, and Ellen Domb.

I found last year's ACA conference enlightening and great fun, and a wonderful blend of what I've referred to before as the two main appraoches to creativity and innovation -- as religion and as process.

This year the conference is specifically focused on creativity at work, and conference organizers say attendees will "gain skills and knowledge that will increase their value to your organization while enhancing their self-growth." These skills and knowledge include:

* Effectively integrate and apply creating, innovating and thinking into every day business lives.
* Accelerate creativity to compete in the market place — speed up your creative processes.
* Explore identifying both the problem and its root cause. Improve results through the creative application of problem solving techniques.
* Recharge creativity batteries in ways that complement innovation.

A few of the over 70 sessions offered:

* Enabling Collaborative Creativity at Work
* The Athlete Mindset: Learn and apply the same creative methods used by professional athletes to succeed in pressure situations
* Using TRIZ Lines of Evolution to Predict and Unfuzzy the Fuzzy Front End
* Creativity, Innovation, and Global Competitiveness
* Innovate On Purpose™
* Creative Ways to Recruit a Creative Workforce – A Case Study
* The Birth of Novelty: Ensuring New Ideas Get a Fighting Chance
* A Study of the Applicability of Idea Generation Techniques
* Risk Taking as factor of Creative Thinking
* A study of the relationships among gender, group size, personal creativity, and group technological creativity

In addition there will be pre-conference workshops including a two-day De Bono workshop and a one-day TRIZ workshop. The ACA is offering a team discount if three or more people from the same company sign up.