Rick Martin, writing in the Tech In Asia blog, recently posted the result of a study done by Adobe about attitudes toward creativity. The results are summarized in the article and in the graphic below.

And the results are eyebrow-raising. Japan is seen by everyone as an incredibly creative place–except by the Japanese themselves! And an astonishingly large number of people in Japan (78%) said creativity is something reserved for people in the arts community. I don’t mean to sound alarmist (OK, actually I do), but this should set off the same  bells and buzzers and active responses that PISA results do. But as Mr Martin and some of the response posters to his blog article state, Japan is a fantastically creative place. In fact, perhaps it may be because Japan has such a high level of creativity in almost everything, that people have a different view of creativity in general. This needs to be considered further…