” The division between work and play is a myth. If America is going to teach its youth to innovate, we need to unite the two.”  Laura Richardson

According to Newsweek, the United States is in a creativity crisis. TIME reports that today’s students are less tolerant of ambiguity and have an aversion to complexity. And The Futurist suggests that the biggest challenge facing our children is their inability to think realistically, creatively, and optimistically about the future. Wake up, America. The real threat to the United States’s continued superpower status isn’t from an arsenal of weapons—it’s from the lack of an arsenal of the mind.

Innovation companies today don’t ask and don’t care about basic skills, grades, or SAT scores—instead, they want to know if you can brainstorm all the possible uses of bubble wrap.

Eighty-five percent of today’s companies searching for creative talent can’t find it. In a recent IBM survey, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the number one leadership competency of the future. And the United Nations just released the Creative Economy Report of 2010, suggesting that creative countries are more economically resilient. As Tim Draper voiced in the documentary 2 Million Minutes, “America is the one country that doesn’t seem to recognize that it is in competition for the great minds and capital of the world.”

Read more in Laura Richardson’s ‘Play Power: How to Turn Around Our Creativity Crisis‘ here.

And, if you liked this post, check out America’s Looming Creativity Crisis.