World Future Society

History's most creative communities enchant people with the divine quality of their achievements. The high performance level of such groups can be attributed to the "creative hothouse effect," which results from a powerful but unusual pattern in human activities. However, the creative hothouse does not always require a formal institutional context, but an environment of mutually stimulating creativity that flourishes on experimentation. To be described as a "creative hothouse," an organization or community must: 1. sustain a high level of innovative creativity for a significant period of time, 2. establish a lasting legacy to which future generations continually return, 3. spawn "geniuses" whose achievements build upon the contributions of often brilliant contemporaries, 4. stand at the center of a wider cultural movement, and 5. create a new idiom, a new way of doing things, that inspires and drives the development of its creative products.