Innovation is the key to good business, writes Bob Muller, director of the Oxford Institute

Everyone who reads this page should try and obtain a copy of a milestone report on creativity, entitled All Our Futures, which I believe will become quoted as much as the famous Small is Beautiful and Limits to Growth.

Its findings and recommendations provide imperatives which business must heed. While it has major implications for education and business, its value is broader due to its discussion on creativity itself.

The chairman of the committee which produced this superb report, Mr Ken Robinson, writes: Why are so many businesses now running courses on developing creativity?

Why do businesses now want more creativity? Why do so many people need to be taught to be creative in the first place? The answer has a direct bearing on the competitiveness of every sort of company.

The world of work is changing beyond all recognition. New technologies are transforming work, who does it, and how they do it. This is true of traditional manufacturing industries. But today's key industries are communications, information, science, technology and entertainment those in which ideas and creativity are the business. In practical terms, firms want people who can adapt, innovate and roll with the changes they face.

They want people who can communicate, work in teams and change direction as quickly as the landscape is moving around them. These qualities are not promoted by a conventional academic education, nor are they meant to be. This is why so many graduates are turned away, or are hastily retrained to revive in them the qualities of creativity and communication that too often have been educated out of them. For the past 20 years, environmentalists have argued that we have damaged the natural ecology of the earth's resources. We have not understood how rich these resources are, nor how they enrich each other.

I think we have been making the same mistake with people. We have spent years partially educating our children the result is adults who have lost touch with, or never discovered, their own creative, intellectual and emotional abilities. If we are serious about developing human resources, we have to recognise how rich and diverse they really are. This attractive, highly readable report, was commissioned by the Government. But what was the Government's response?

The report has 308 findings and conclusions, and 59 recommendations. Some people are critical of targeting so much at a very stretched Government. Others, who are more politically minded, question the wisdom of the timing in putting these proposals to a government which is currently over-committed to literacy and other basic educational issues.

The response, shows a well-meaning government, currently highly constrained when considering the report's sweeping proposals.

After saying what an excellent job has been done by the committee, and that it has borne the committee's recommendations in mind when revising policy, the Government has taken little on board. The Government's very disappointing response means that it is critical that we take the recommendations forward, which, of course, needs much creativity!

The Oxford Institute, which I direct, has committed itself to co-ordinating this effort. If you would like to help by proposing and taking on ownership of an action, please let me know by contacting me by e-mail at 100705.300@compuserve.com

The report can be read on www.dfee.gov.uk or request a hard copy by e-mail on dfee@prologistics.co.uk or telephone 0845 6022260.