On the 10th of January of 2019 I attended the presentation of a new book about creativity written by two people who opt for creativity and innovation. I was quite interested not only because of the topic, but, above all, because one of the authors is an E.P. whom I already talked about in 2016 when we launched the second edition of the mentoring program MET Community in Bilbao.
I invite you to discover who I’m talking about and which is the book I’m referring to.
It was around 19:00 and, as always, I arrived running to the Bilbao office of the Urbegi Foundation in the Ugasko 1 street, in Deusto. Thank God it’s near the University of Deusto, because, otherwise, I don’t think I would have arrived on time (because I hate when people come late). But the important thing is that I got there, because I wanted to and it interested me. There was Violeta González Bermúdez. As soon as I heard about the presentation of her book, I signed up for it right away. How was I going to miss this occasion? Violeta embarked on writing a book of the Ópera Prima publisher together with Juan Pastor Bustamante, the creativity and innovation expert and CEO of the creativity and innovation consulting called Repensadores:
«Vitamina creativa para mentes inquietas. Claves para potenciar la creatividad e innovación en personas y organizaciones»
(Creative vitamin for tireless minds. Keys to enhance creativity and innovation in people and organizations)
And that’s where I met not only Violeta but many other people (because the room was full), and among whom there also were two entrepreneurial women of MET Community, María Astigarraga, also from the 2016 edition, and Judit Urquijo, from the first edition of the program. I imagine that for Maitane Gómez, from Urbegi and Violeta’s mentor, seeing the steps she is making will be very rewarding.
Violeta, journalist as a profession and by vocation since she was 14 years old, is in her element in information and communication technologies. She loves travelling, reading and any field related to culture and creativity. Already in 2016, when I met her, she had founded Ultravioleta Social Media Boutique, “a custom communication and digital marketing boutique, a workshop where strategies are defined and communicative actions are put into operation in a personalized way”.
She is a great professional with many years of experience and training behind her. Not in vain, she’s been working in the communication and media content world for more than 25 years, as an editor, a columnist, a community manager, a trainer and a lecturer. She is responsible, strongly involved in the projects she develops, very close, thoughtful and compromised with taking care of others and of the work she does, organized, methodical and rigorous, and she believes in teamwork.
She started her journey as an entrepreneur around 2012 specializing in innovation and trends, and in helping companies and organizations to project their best image in the digital environment. At the moment, she is an analyst of trends in C4E Communication for Effectiveness, a company based in Bilbao, where she lives, even though she is from Cantabria.
Their book proposes resources, tools, strategies and techniques to create; whether it is to get back our creative ability, to discover it and, why not, to prepare the creative leaders of the future. The authors’ goal with this book was to, in a simple way, encourage us to incorporate creativity and innovation, both in our personal and professional lives, because they believe we need a daily dose of creative vitamin.
The book starts with an overview of the creative culture on organizations: they recommend us a decalogue for the business creative culture, they present how to stimulate the culture of partnership, they remind us which one is the driver of innovation, they give us clues about how to value the intrapreneurs, they introduce us to the creative leader, they suggest the type of questions we should be asking ourselves and they remind us the characteristics of the creative and innovative people.
In the second part of the book, the authors propose us tools to manage the process of innovation and creativity in a simpler way: they introduce us to the importance of design, they tell us about the importance of the creativity techniques, they remind us about the importance of the value proposals and of the work to be done, the necessity of stablishing the innovation plans or action maps, the way of communicating ideas of the processes of innovation and, finally, the importance of the visual thinking in the process of innovation.
The third part of the book is focused on personal creativity, in how to work through and enhance it since we are children; in how to transmit the entrepreneurial spirit to our children, the importance of personal relationships, humor, design thinking and meditation to be more creative and innovative.
Violeta and Juan were joined by creativity and innovation, because they think that “we need creativity every day”, because “there is a connection between creativity and health”, because “many of the problems of the companies are unlocked through the creative development”, because “the creative one is the facilitator of ideas”. Because of that and because they firmly believe in the creative vitamin, Violeta and Juan present us an easy-to-read book which has already proven, by very concrete examples, that if we follow its guidelines, we’ll achieve many of our goals as E.P.
Thank you Violeta (@vioglez) and Juan (@JuanPastorBus) for believing in creativity and for making the entrepreneurial way easier.
Happy New Year to everyone, we’ll see each other in a couple of weeks.
Translated by María Ubierna Quintanilla and supervised by Arantza Arruti.