From left to right: Susan Huckle, Jasmin Bavarva, Skip Garner, Andrew Webber, Mehdi Kargar, Traci Roberts

In a world filled with complex, multi-layered problems, creative solutions are in high demand. According to Newsweek last year, “A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 ‘leadership competency’ of the future”, yet schools and businesses spend almost nothing on creativity or problem-solving training. Instead, children are marshaled from one box to another, first through years of standardized testing and rote memorization up until college course requirements. New companies and those that are re-inventing themselves to be competitive need more innovators instead of followers.

While knowledge may certainly be on the rise because of access to information, the creativity to put it into action is far below what it has been in America in decades. And in a global market, where Britain and Europe are working hard to innovate their curricula with more problem solving training, American students may enter the job market only to find themselves unable to compete.

The consequences of such a lack of creativity could be serious: loss of America’s economic competitiveness in the global market; inability to respond to new and emerging diseases that affect both us and our food; conflicts fueled by competition in a world in need of new, more efficient technologies that make the most of scarce resources.

At Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, creative solutions are being born every day. To stimulate even more ideas, a new award has been set in place by its Executive Director, Harold “Skip” Garner, Ph.D. Fashioned after a similar creativity program at General Atomics by Dr. Tahiro Ohkawa in the mid-80s, the Awakho (Ohkawa spelled backwards) Award seeks to develop solutions to complex problems by inspiring employees to write down their creative ideas, no matter how seemingly far-fetched, every day. Ultimately, those who took the initiative to participate in the Award challenge at General Atomics, including a young Dr. Garner, were asked to join “The Institute”, an internal think tank tasked with developing avante-garde solutions to challenges in physics, engineering, and computer science in the Star Wars era.