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# What is Innovation?
## ***A Creativity That Emerges From a Collective Worldmaking***
## We're building a community of practice where innovation facilitators, educators, leaders, and creative practitioners can collaboratively discover and invent new powerful alternatives to the limitations of ideation-based creativity.

Together, we’re learning to work creatively with emergence, complexity, and collaboration as the foundation of breakthrough change.

# **Individual ideation has limited potential**
## ***We're Building Something Different***
## What emerges when you move from isolated thinking to collective worldmaking? When you experimentally ask "what else can it do?" instead of "what is it?" When creativity emerges from the middle of emergent action rather than from solitary brainstorming?
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At Emergent Futures Lab, we're assembling an alternative community of practice that connects and catalyzes practitioners, academics, educators, coaches, and facilitators who understand creativity as fundamentally relational. Through making-centered learning, open-ended challenges, and interactive tools, we help people discover how creativity emerges from the dynamic relationships between all elements in complex assemblages.

Whether you're facilitating innovation, teaching the next generation, or sensing there are alternatives to traditional ideation-based approaches, you'll find frameworks for thriving creatively through emergence, complexity, and collaboration—building worlds through collaborative making rather than isolated thinking.

# What They Are Saying

#### Diane Ragsdale

##### Director of Creative Leadership MA, Scholar and Faculty of Creative Leadership @ Minneapolis College of Art and Design

I recently participated in two workshops (one with my students in the MA in Creative Leadership program and one with some colleagues at MCAD). I think the one thing that has most changed in my mindset around innovation is that I have dropped the idea/practice of sitting by myself or others and ideating as a way to begin. I now see that radical innovation require collective embodied making (and re-making).

The process of pattern recognition, blocking and probing is powerful. Once I used it in the workshop I began to see so many ways this could be applied.

Highly recommend taking a workshop with Jason & Iain. Plus they have a humorous, friendly rapport, which makes the experience feel relaxed and enjoyable.

#### Steven Greenstein

##### STEM Innovation Professor @ Montclair State University

I've read a lot of Iain and Jason's writings about their Innovation Framework (so much of their book is so good, bits of radical insight every time I open it:), but nothing beats experiencing it in a workshop, which is something I'd wanted to do for a while and finally got to do last month.

As others have mentioned, in surprisingly little time, I had the profound experience of inventing something I could have never imagined.

I have never been able to imagine how one might do anything other than the "I think therefore I am" approach, so this was the most surprising and valuable takeaway for me.

As a math learner and educator for many years, I've always valued the experience over the output, and now I have new ways of talking about it and making it happen.

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## Ready to Explore What Else Is Possible?

### ***Start Here:*** **Subscribe to Our Newsletter** Discover insights from 200+ weekly explorations of emergence, creativity, and innovation that bridge theory and practice

### ***Deepen Your Understanding:*** **Get the Book** Access the complete foundation with *"Innovating Emergent Futures"* - our comprehensive guide to emergence-based creativity

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### ***Transform:* Professional Development** *Coming Q4 2025*: Courses on emergent creativity and making-centered approaches

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