Collaborative Creativity: Cultivating Innovation in Shared Spaces
By Saheed Sunday
This is the 21st century. Herein, almost every field of study is meeting up at a point of intersection with other fields of study. Thus, it is almost pertinent to say that a modern human will be one who identifies these changes, and strives to make his/her own skill(s) useful within this point of intersection. To achieve this, there is the growing need to adopt the system of collaborative spaces wherein different experts in fields such as writing, entrepreneurship, and art come together to strewn creativity from within. What then is a collaborative space?
According to an article published in Wework Ideas, “Collaborative workspaces are offices in which employees of various companies work under one roof. Companies sharing a collaborative workspace can come in all sizes—from growing startups to global enterprises.” However, for the context of this piece, I would love to define a collaborative space as one where different skill owners — entrepreneurs, artists, writers, changemakers, etc. — collaborate under one organisation to produce a masterpiece of diverse ideas.
The best case study to foreground the concept of collaborative spaces and the creativity that comes along with it is ZODML itself. Although ZODML is widely recognized as a library where students, writers, and educationists alike can read books per their intellectual needs, however, there also exists an intra-organizational framework by ZODML that fosters collaborative creativity. One of these frameworks is that of the annual poetry prize.
On May 27, 2023, the ZODML had its inaugural award ceremony for the Poetry Prize they had earlier sent out its call. Out of the 791 entries that were received from different parts of Nigeria, five entries stood out and won the competition. Each of them: Saheed Sunday, Chidiebere Sullivan Nwuguru, Lenient Amidu, Adetola Jerry-Adesewo, and Seyi Ojenike were compensated for their outstanding entries, and were given the privilege of being acknowledged and recognized by different national TVs and newspapers. The fact that these five people won the contest, however, is not the interesting part of it. The interesting part is that these students have almost different fields of study in their respective public universities, ranging from English Language to Medicine, and African Studies. The question, therefore, is how were these students able to come up with their masterpieces on a single theme even though they have different educational backgrounds? This is exactly one of the advantages of collaborative creativity.
Another advantage of a collaborative space is the creation of a community. For instance, since the award ceremony, ZODML has built a community with these five poets so that they have kept on making groundbreaking achievements. Just recently, the five of them got a solicitation for the publication of an Anthology comprising their poems and the poems of five Irish poets in commemoration of the late W.B. Yeats. The advantage of this literary community that ZODML has built includes an increase in both their levels of creativity and productivity.
Finally, the world is a space of never-ending information. However, nobody is an island of knowledge. Everyone needs someone or something to keep them abreast of the happenings in the world. Through the creation of a collaborative space, we all get to not only have access to new ideas, but also get to increase our level of productivity and creativity while working on those ideas.
