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FOUNDER'S STORY
Merlegrace O'Brien | Phd.c. MPhil Future Studies FPRISA
How we Work
Assignments
Each innovation assignment is a working research co-lab purposefully designed to solve a problem based on a real need in the client brief. Currently, Merlegrace O'Brien, as the Principal Futurist scopes and frames each problem from its root cause using our Trendstar Radar to map a flightplan of discovery for each C8 Mission.
Mission Crew
Each client is assigned a purpose-fit crew to reach the ideal destination with specific solution outcomes in a specified timeframe. Each mission crew is selected from our qualified team of peak performance innovators who specialize in practice areas of expertise.
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Our C8 Method
C8 is Creation iLab's 'secret sauce' - a semi-structured, unbeatable innovation process designed on principles of creative intelligence - that uses 8 stargates to maximise the market value potential of the IP created. A standard C8 mission flightplan navigates between (1) Present reality (2) Rising trends (3) Unfolding scenarios (4) Emerging opportunity spaces (5) IP Concept creation (6) Business Model Prototyping (7) Storytelling and (8) Analytics.
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Each C8 Stargate has its own body of knowledge to provide academic rigor systematically, with synergy. We typically immerse ourselves in 'black hole research' probing for answers in laboratory-style experiments with truth.
As a transdisciplinarity team, we provoke the future by moving from subjective knowledge to objective truths using our C8 process as an ontological compass and epistemological way of knowing reality and fore-seeing beyond a linear future. With this creative intelligence, we are able to conceptualise stable, sustainable solutions, trustworthy recipes and innovation prescriptions custom-designed to solve today's problems in a bold, imaginative future-fit way.
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Our Brand Symbol & Story
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With the fields of art and science in a common space, conventional academic and linear business models hit the wall in the 21st century. Realising the need for a bold, new approach to reality, we went in search of a way to understand art and science as one using the paradigm of Creative Intelligence.
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As the world's only Futurist also professionally trained in the world's oldest classical dance codified on creative intelligence (Odissi) - Merlegrace O'Brien, our founder unearthed the old to make better sense of the new.
Guided by wise teachers across Africa, Europe, India, China and the USA, Merle founded Creation iLab in 2013 to transcend old paradigms preventing Humanity from evolving a more ideal, preferable future.
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As an African Innovation Institute for the Future we also draw upon a rich 100 000 year legacy of Ubuntu Design Thinking - as per scientific evidence at Blombos Caves - used to create artefacts from the firestone to the smartphone. We are proud to be part of Afrika's design innovators leading a counter-revolution in thinking about the 4th industrial revolution as human creative intelligence competes with artificial intelligence for jobs, resources, wealth and power. We are helping Afrika to change the game in unthinkable ways.
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Creation iLab's brand symbol is thus a sign of our heritage, vision, reality and C8 methodology grounded in the art and science of creative intelligence as a 21st century paradigm. Designed as a rose, an atom, an axis and neural nanocircuit, it perfectly embodies our understanding of creative intelligence as a lifescience and economic driver of #AnEveNWorld.
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