By Dr. Hwa A. Lim, PhD, MBA Chairperson & CEO, D'Trends Inc.   “Conformity is a change in a person’s behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person or a group of people. It involves a loss of self-reliance, which undermines the person’s creativity by reducing his or her confidence in himself or herself as a person who can exercise his or her creativity.” - Adapted from E. Aronson, The Social Animal, (Freeman, New York, 1992). Since the dawn of human history, our lives, not to mention the modern mores and ways of life, have been influenced and greatly shaped by the creative contributions of many people immersed in different cultures. What then is creativity? How is creativity influenced by culture? Creativity is sometimes used interchangeably in the stead of maturity. If maturity can be defined as seeing the world through eyes other than one’s own, creativity might be defined as seeing the world through sufficiently new eyes so that new solutions appear. In fact, creativity can take two forms: invention – in which we create totally new things, such as the invention of the computer; and innovation – in which we do old things in new ways, such as coming up with new ways of manufacturing the computer cheaply so that it is affordable. As such, a creative act, by definition, involves the introduction of novel elements into an established domain, and as such, creativity threatens the conventional way of doing things. In almost all instances, there will be much resistance faced by the creator. Instead of succumbing to the insidious pressure to conform, the creator must be ready to challenge and persevere in the face of obstacles. Consider the 15th-century Asia. The Malayan Peninsula and Indonesian Archipelago were the centers of international spice trade. For China, its curiosity, its instinct for exploration and its drive to build had created all the technologies necessary for an industrial revolution – something that would not occur until the 18th century or some 350 years later, in Europe! The Asians had blast furnace and piston bellows for making steel; gunpowder and cannon for military conquest; the compass and rudder for exploration; paper, movable type, and printing press for disseminating knowledge; the wheeled plow, horse collar, rotary threshing machines, mechanical seeders to generate agricultural surpluses; the ability to drill for natural gas; decimal systems, negative numbers, and the concept of zero to analyze what they were doing. At the beginning of the 15th century, about a hundred years before Columbus’ voyage, Admiral Cheng Ho – the Muslim eunuch who became the greatest admiral in the Chinese history – built a huge navy comprising of 62 junks and 225 other vessels, in other words, four to five times as large as those of Columbus’. He would explore the Indian Ocean seven times, stopping over in the Malayan Peninsula and other Southeast Asian countries. These large armadas of 28,000 men were exploring the east coast of Africa at about the same time when the Portuguese and Spaniard were sending out much smaller expeditions down the west coast of Africa. According to Gavin Menzies, there is much evidence that the Muslim eunuch first discovered North America in 1421, some seventy years before Columbus (1492); and he was the first to circumnavigate the world a century before Ferdinand Magellan did in 1519-1522. By the end of the 15th century, the demand for order had overridden intrinsic human curiosity, the desire to explore and the drive to build. Asia could have been the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution centuries earlier than that actually took place in Europe. The 15th-century Asia is, but an example. Change and the introduction of novel elements are something that most societies fear. Without the comfort of old, chaos always seems to loom. Since chaos must be suppressed, new knowledge must be repressed. This particular insular habit of new knowledge partially explains why it was not the Asians, but the Portuguese and the Spaniards who first conquered the Malayan Peninsula before the British. To advance and use knowledge, a society needs the right mix of chaos and order. Too much order does not work. Too much chaos, for example the Soviet Union after perestroika, does not work either. With a proper balance of chaos and order, creativity flourishes. Creativity does not occur when it has to challenge authority. Creativity occurs when there is no authority to challenge – when there is an empty space without order where creativity can grow unmolested. But to many, an empty space without order is chaos, and chaos must be suppressed. Creativity is the ability to combine ideas in a unique way or to make unusual associations between ideas. Most people have creative potential, but to unleash that potential we have to get out of the psychological ruts most of us get into and learn how to think about a problem in a divergent ways. Brain – The Creativity Organ For all its majesty, the brain is a mass of grayish-pink, convoluted matter with the consistency of warm jello. No wonder the brain has been nicknamed “wetware” by computer scientists trying to emulate its secrets in computer technology. Though the brain represents less than 2% of the body weight, it uses 25% of the oxygen one breathes and 70% of the glucose supply. It has five basic regions: Cerebellum – Center for coordinating body movement; Brain stem – The part that is responsible for basic life functions such as breathing; Thalamus – A Kuala Lumpur Central (KL Sentral) relay station for incoming data from all senses except smell; Hypothalamus – A regulator for hunger, thirst, sleep, sexuality and emotions; Cerebrum – The gray matter, home to thought, vision, language, memory and emotions. It is divided into two hemispheres. If right-handed, odds are the right hemisphere is where one makes sense of music, images, space, and emotions; the left hemisphere is apt to focus on math, language, and speech. In left-handed people, tasks are reversed between the hemispheres. A philosopher once suggested if the human brain were simple enough to be understood, a human would be too simple-minded to comprehend his or her own brain. Even as one is reading these words, the brain is analyzing and processing information with an alacrity that makes the world’s fastest supercomputer look like a baby’s toy. The minimum number of possible thought patterns, a psychologist once estimated, is 1 followed by 6.5 miles of typed zeroes! As complex as the brain is, this incredible organ has begun to yield its secrets. Despite what we may have heard about how a human loses 100,000 brain cells from aging each year, a recent study shows that moderate exercise, physical or mental, can rejuvenate the brain. The newest studies tend to show no appreciable decline over most people’s life span. Yet the consensus is still that younger people learn faster than older people. This is an advantage young people have in the learning process, but mature people also have a certain advantage, as can be seen in the two types of intelligence: Fluid intelligence – is brute processing ability, how quickly and accurately we learn information and solve problems. Fluid intelligence starts to decline by our 30s, partly because the nerve conduction slows. An older person can still solve problem well, but needs a bit more time. Reaction times lengthen with age. Crystallized intelligence – is accumulated knowledge. It increases with age and experience. A survey indicates that between the ages of five and seventeen there is a drastic drop in the creative level in both male and female subjects. Table 1. When individuals at various ages were tested for creativity, the results were as follows: Age Percent creative 40 2% 35 2% 30 2% 17 10% 5 90% During that young vulnerable growing period, a “we-are-not-creative” attitude takes over, and most youngsters take this particular part of their given equipment for granted. Nonetheless, young people are like sponges – they soak up new information quicker. Older people are still very capable of learning. They make up for their slower response with their experience. They are just wiser and they are just more mature. They make up for their lack of fluid intelligence with crystallized intelligence. Creative Thinking Donald Schon, an American writer on organization and learning, once argued that creativity, particularly scientific creativity, comes from displacement of concepts, i.e., from taking concepts from one field and applying them to another in order to bring fresh perspectives. Synectic uses analogies and inverted rationale to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.6 It operates on the assumption that most problems are not new. The challenge is to view the problem in a new way, to try to abandon the familiar or routine ways that one is used to looking at things. For instance, instead of holding the common view of a hen lays eggs, take a different perspective by arguing a hen is an egg’s way of making another egg; instead of thinking that a pet loves the owner, argue that the owner is the pet’s way of getting to the food. One of the most famous example in which analogy resulted in a creative breakthrough is Alexander Graham Bell’s observation that it might be possible to take concepts that operate in the ear and apply them to the “talking box.” Thus, he invented the telephone. Zigzag or lateral thinking is a replacement for the more traditional vertical thinking where each step in the process follows from the previous step in an unbroken sequence. Vertical thinking is often seen as rational thinking for each step has to be correct and it deals with only what is relevant. With lateral thinking, individuals emphasize thinking sideways – not developing a pattern but restructuring a pattern. It is not sequential. For example, one can tackle a problem from the solution end rather than the starting end, and back in various beginning states. Lateral thinking does not have to be correct at each step. In fact, in some cases, it has to go through a wrong area in order to reach a position from which a correct path may be visible. Lateral thinking also deliberately involves random or irrelevant information to bring about a new way of looking at the problem. Thinking out of the box is another excellent approach. Flea trainers have observed a predictable and strange behavior of fleas while training them. Fleas are trained by putting them in a cardboard box with a lid on. The fleas will jump up and hit the top of the box over and over again. The fleas continue to jump, but they are no longer jumping high enough to hit the lid. Apparently, they have learned a lesson. When the lid is removed, the fleas will jump, but they will not jump out of the box. The reason is very simple. They have been conditioned to jump just so high. To be creative, we have to “think out of the box” and not be conformed by real or imagined pressures. Creative Destruction Business professionals and technologists work in a myriad of small, medium and large companies that rely for their financial health, if not their very survival, on the reactions of the market forces to their creative inventions and innovations. Traditionally, the academia competed in a very different environment. They were nurtured in research institutes and university laboratories, where in a tenured position, salaries were more or less assured and professional rewards and recognition were meted out through an elaborate system that included literature citations, research grants and prizes. The current generation of new academia is likely to be more entrepreneurial-minded, or to be reduced to making obsequious gestures toward those who hold the purse strings on their research. Notwithstanding, the academic sector can still be the nidus of creativity. The private sector, on the other hand, is always on the look out for new technologies or marketable innovations to transfer. New technologies mean change. Change means a discontinuity or disequilibrium. Disequilibrium conditions create a shift to high-return and high-growth opportunities. The winners are entrepreneurs who understand the new technologies, are lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and have the skills to take advantage of these new situations. They become rich, usually filthy rich. A cash in point– yes cash, NOT case – is Bill Gates who tapped into the maturing PC market in the 1980s. On a larger scale, entrepreneurs are central to the process of creative destruction since they are individuals who bring new technologies and new concepts into active commercial use. In so doing, they “destroy” older technologies in a process of creative destruction. Entrepreneurs are the change agents of capitalism. They are risk takers, organizers and doers, not usually thinkers and inventors. The characteristics needed to create new knowledge are very different from the characteristics needed to bring that knowledge into active use. J.P. Morgan (1837-1913), an American financier, built his companies around Thomas Edison’s many inventions. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented in the 1980s many of the technologies that make computers easier to use, including the computer mouse, the computer icon and the pull-down menus. These technologies enable computer novices to run computers without memorizing obscure commands. Yet it was Apple Computer and particularly Microsoft that brought the products to the market first. Bill Gates has invented no new technologies and was never a creative software programmer. He is, however, an extremely successful entrepreneur, and the wealthiest man on Earth. East Meets West Research on culture and creativity reflects the fact that culture is omnipresent. In particular, the Asian view traditionally emphasizes control by the environment so that the individual adapts; the Western view emphasizes the individual so that the individual changes the environment. Indeed, the traditional Asian family has been described as providing a relatively warm atmosphere in which the individual finds not merely economic security, but also of most of the individual’s needs. Beyond the warmth of the family lies what the individual considers as the cold and harsh world wherein his or her fate becomes unpredictable. This bleakness conjured up of the outside world is often used to discipline a misbehaving child. In contrast, the typical way of disciplining a child in the Western world is to ground the child inside the house! Outside of the family, individuals will also be differentially tuned into evaluating positive or negative self-relevant information in accordance with the culture in which they have been socialized. The central focus of individualistic society is to encourage the person to be his or her own unique and spontaneous self. This pattern of socialization tends to identify those positively-valued attributes of the self that accentuates the person’s uniqueness. It draws attention to a person’s positive features, praising and complimenting them. The central focus of collectivistic society, on the other hand, tends to seek out negatively-valued attributes that prevent the person from fitting in with the rest of the social group. It draws attention to a person’s shortcomings, problems or potentially negative features that need to be corrected to meet the expectations or norms common in a social relationship. As a result, self-esteem can be greatly dampened and creativity subdued. East West Tightly organized, with social rules and norms to regulate behaviour Loosely organized, with few social rules and norms. Collectivistic, with emphasis on social group. Individualistic, with emphasis on the individual. Hierarchical, with distinctive ranks and status. Egalitarian, with less distinction between superiors and subordinates. Great emphasis on social order and harmony in the family and society. Great emphasis on the open and democratic exchange of ideas between individuals. More concern with face or in gaining the social approval of the group. More concerned with realizing one's creative potential in life. Table 2. A table to compare and contrast Eastern and Western cultures (adapted from Ng Aik Kwang, Why Asians Are Less Creative Than Westerners? - Prentice Hall, Singapore, 2001) To conform is to change a person’s behavior or opinions as a result of real or imagined pressure from a person, a group of people or peers. Conformity leads to loss of self-reliance – a loss that undermines the person’s creativity by reducing his or her confidence in himself or herself as a person who can exercise his or her creativity. Thus, instead of marching forward in accordance to his or her own internal drive and desire, the conformist engages in a copious imitation of the majority. In so doing, the conformist avoids nakedly exposing himself or herself to the challenge of the creative art for two possible reasons: 1) fear of not being able to measure up to it, or 2) risks the censure of the group. In such situations, peer or group pressures towards conformity can actually come as a welcome relief to him or her, serving as a defensive form of escape from creativity. Other social behaviors can also suppress creativity. When a person is task-involved, he or she is an origin of action. As a result, he or she experiences an inner sense of psychological freedom to create. In contrast, when a person is ego-involved, he or she is a pawn to the action and feels controlled by extraneous and alien forces including rewards, punishments, and introjects such as guilt, anxiety or shame. Figure 1. A simple model that shows how culture may determine behaviour, and thus affects creativity. The term “face” is used to describe the social reputation that is acquired by getting on in life through success or ostentation. Simply put, face is a measure of the social recognition accorded by society to oneself. Because of face, a person will go to great lengths to behave in ways designed to display and protect both the image and reality of that position in life which he or she has achieved. For example, people in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan splurge in branded cars such as BMW and Mercedes Benz in order to show off their wealth or social status. In this way, they become ego-involved hostages, that is, they are a perpetual pawn of the pressure to conform to the materialistic majority. The proclivity for ready-to-wear excuses and the tendency for making light fiction of an extemporaneous character are certainly a by-product of saving face. Self-improvement approaches can also heighten or diminish creativity. For example, education is important internally for personal development; externally, it is important for social mobility. In some societies, so obsessed with grades that students have fallen into the ill-habit of buying self-help books and “models answers” to past-years examination questions. Trained to solve problems in order to do well in examinations does not automatically lead to creative minds. According to Lee Yuan Tseh, the well-respected Asian who won the 1986 Chemistry Nobel Prize, good training in a regimented education system can produce good achievements in competitions and examinations, but achievements in scientific breakthroughs are the results of being educated in an open, free society in which students are encouraged to ask questions and find out answers on their own. Conclusion Right after the Second World War, East Asian region, then characterized by high levels of illiteracy and ravaged by wars and civil wars, had a number of countries ranked the poorest in the world. Latin America and Africa were then thought to be on the threshold of rapid development. The Asians, through hard work and creative responses, proved that common belief fallacious. From 1965 through 1990, twenty-three economies of East Asia grew faster than any other parts of the world. Of note were the high-performing economies of Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. To get a proper perspective of the scale of rapid development, we note that it took Britain 58 years to double its real per capita income from 1780, America 47 years from 1839, Japan 34 years from 1900, while Malaysia took about a decade, not to mention how the Malaysians successfully tamed the Asian Economic Tempest of 1997! Now with globalization, the East and the West have begun to merge and embrace each other’s culture so that each can benefit from the other. The impact of information technology cannot be belittled. An important thing to note is that instead of absorbing new information into the conventional mindset, one should change one’s mindset to absorb the new information. This way, one will be more creative. In entrepreneurialship, changing technologies, new managerial methods, more intense global and domestic competition, and consumer’s satiation with standardized product all contribute to an “age of consumer choice.” In this situation, businesses will have to learn to tailor products to niche markets and introduce new products at a much faster rate. This requires far more innovation than in the past, and innovation requires the creativity of people. According to economist Jeff Madrick, former financial editor of Business Week and monthly columnist for the New York Times, market and information are inseparable for growth. After the Second World War, many countries had access to the world market, but only the East Asians were able to take advantage of it. Aside from the size and growth of markets, the flow of information and creative technological advances, key ingredients for the rapid growth in East Asia include literacy and educational attainment, improvement of health of the population, the distribution of wealth and assets, the availability of financial capital, equitable legal institutions, the abundance of natural resources, vitality of entrepreneurialism, and peace and political stability. What the Asians missed in the 15th century is being made up half a millennium later in the 20th and 21st centuries. Malaysia is marching steadily towards Vision 2020 – a national goal to be by year 2020 a developed nation fueled by creative and innovative K-economy. Malaysia has all the right ingredients. With a proper mindset, equable and an equitable legal institution, and a reengineered education system, there is no reason why Malaysia will not meet this goal. Dr. Hwa A. Lim is an internationally respected authority on bioinformatics and biotechnology. He is active in both the academic and the private sectors. He is on the boards of several biotech companies in the U.S.; an affiliated member of the University of Texas at Dallas; a member of the International Advisory Council of China Project Management Standardization Program; a visiting professor of the Institute of Genetics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and the Secretary-General of Enlighten Noah 25. Dr. Lim travels extensively to do business, to lecture, and to mingle with locals to experience and learn firsthand – something that he enjoys as a part-time writer writing on diverse topics. He is credited with coining the neologism “Bioinformatics” in 1987, a credit that earns him the title “The Father of Bioinformatics”. He prides himself in establishing and shaping bioinformatics when the field was still nascent, and for initiating the world’s very first bioinformatics conference series. In 1997, he founded D’Trends, Inc., a professional biotech and nanotech consulting company, and in 2002, with three other colleagues, he co-founded NanoBiotech Sdn Bhd, an emerging nanobiotech company based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Dr. Lim has the distinction of being a key member of two separate teams that took two different companies to IPO in the U.S. Dr. Lim obtained his Ph.D. (Science), M.A. (Science), and MBA (strategy and business laws) from the United States, his B.Sc. (Honours) and ARCS from Imperial College of Sc. Tech. & Medicine, the University of London, United Kingdom. Dr. Hwa A. Lim can be contacted hal@d-trends.com.