Tim Brown discusses how creativity has an essential role in education It was good to see a strong focus on education at Davos this year. There seems to be a growing realization that basic issues such as education, health and employment require fundamental reinvention if we are to face the coming challenges of a more volatile interconnected world. One session at the Annual Meeting that I particularly enjoyed discussed the addition of creative and artistic education to the traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) agenda. John Maeda, Carol Becker, Justine Cassell and Tomas Saraceno made a compelling case for the benefits of cross-fertilization between arts and sciences. Maeda mentioned that the Rhode Island School of Design (of which he is President) was founded on the idea of the economic benefits of design. A similar case was made for the founding of both the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Artist Tomas Saraceno showed an inspiring example of how science can help art achieve its creative goals and, along the way, create new science, while Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, talked about how the arts helps develop, what she calls, the “particularity” of the person. The idea of individuality and unique creative contribution would seem to have a role in both the arts and the sciences. The overall conclusion from the session was that creativity has an essential role to play in education, whether for the purposes of enhancing technical innovation or for creating well-rounded graduates who can truly contribute to society. This same insight, along with many others, emerged from the first roundtable held by the Global Agenda Council on Design & Innovation in November 2012. Design and innovation impact every aspect of the world around us. Everything made by humanity has been designed in some way. Sometimes the design is intentional and elegant; many times it is unintentional and far from optimal. The Global Agenda Council on Design & Innovation plans to host a series of conversations about topics on which design and innovation is having, or might have, a significant impact.