Teresa M. Amabile, Ph.D.
Baker Foundation Professor
Harvard Business School
Labor of Love: Insights from a Creativity Research Program
For 45 years, beginning with a series of empirical and theoretical papers in the 1970s and 1980s, Teresa Amabile researched, wrote about, and was instrumental in establishing, the social psychology of creativity – the study of how the social environment can influence creative behavior, primarily by influencing motivational state. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, she incorporated the study of creativity into a broader investigation of the day-by-day psychological experience and performance of people doing creative work inside organizations. She is considered a leading scholar of creativity and innovation.
Teresa is currently leading a team of five scholars studying American professionals’ experience of transitioning to retirement. This research program focuses on the role of psychological factors, such as self-identity, and social factors, such as relationships, in the ways people make decisions about retirement, experience it, and restructure their lives during it.
Teresa’s scholarly work has appeared in a variety of psychology and organizational behavior journals, as well as her books, including The Social Psychology of Creativity (1983) and its update, Creativity in Context (1996); Growing Up Creative (1989); and The Progress Principle (2011). She has received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference, as well as other honors and grants.
Teresa holds a B.S. in chemistry from Canisius College and a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University.
Martijn van de Wiel
Creative Entrepreneur
Unlock Creativity – Educational Experiments in Training of Design Sketching Skills
Martijn van de Wiel is an independent Dutch creative entrepreneur and design teacher with a background in Industrial and Spatial Design. Operating from his studio in The Hague, he teaches courses and runs workshops in the field of Design Sketching.
The institutions he is affiliated with include: Technical University Delft, Technical University Eindhoven, and The Hague University of Applied Science. His sketching workshops, packaged under the Design Sketching label, include design schools, corporate teams and life long learners.
Martijn is on a mission to help aspiring and professional designers unlock their creative potential. He believes all humans are creative by nature, yet our risk-averse tendencies often block the ability to tap into our creativity. He is convinced that training exploratory sketching muscles is an effective way to build confidence and allow creativity to flow.
This belief has been driving him for more than two decades to share his insights with a worldwide audience. Through hands-on classes, keynote talks, and a firm online presence, Martijn keeps beating the drum for sketching as a vehicle to support thinking and stimulate the imagination.
Learn by doing is not only his didactical approach in class, it’s also his own modus operandi. In close collaboration with like-minded creatives he is constantly experimenting with new interactive formats and tools for remote and on-site skill training.
In search of a solution to share content with his students, he co-founded Sketchdrive in 2014 – an online platform for sharing visual work in online classes. It is now successfully being used worldwide in online courses with image based content and hands-on assignments.
As a result of the challenges brought on by the 2020 pandemic and inspired by a new generation of online creators, Martijn started experimenting with live streaming video from his studio. Tired of serving his students on platforms incompatible with his needs, he responded with a multi-camera setup, video lights and high quality sound. This new studio setup enabled him to host his remote classes like a tv-show, professionally directing his visual content on-the-fly.
This new tv-format proved to be better at engaging participants in live sketching activities compared to the pre-pandemic method, leading him to implement his remote setup in a new post-pandemic format. Martijn is currently exploring new ways to scale up his reach and amplify his impact.