Wills To Give An Open Public Lecture in Zimbabwe
By Novell Zwange – HARARE – Anamaria Wills, award winning CEO of leading creativity and innovation business CIDA International, has been invited by the British Council in Zimbabwe to give a Public Lecture on Creativity and Innovation in Business later this month. The last time she gave a lecture for the British Council, in Lagos, Nigeria, the anticipated audience of 150 turned into 500 attendees!
Anamaria will talk about the difference between creativity and innovation and how innovation is the essential life blood of companies in the 21st century. Drawing on examples ranging from the BBC to Chartered Accountancy, she will illustrate how the innate creative capacity of any company’s workforce is the most vital element in a leader’s toolkit for success.
The Lecture is part of the British Council’s Creative Enterprise Programme in Zimbabwe, which also includes a two-day Innovation Workshop delivered by Anamaria, in which she will show companies ways of: identifying the unmet needs of your customers,generating and
explore new ideas, distinguishingvalue for your customer and benefit for you
Designed with partners in Silicon Valley, the CIDA Innovation process has met with equal enthusiasm by creatives, designers, engineers and professional services. This is an opportunity for Zimbabwe businesses to learn a process that they will be able to apply in their
organisation again and again to maximise their potential for increased customer value and sustained company success.
Anamaria’s work for the British Council will also see her going to Lagos in November and to Kenya in January to work with more creative entrepreneurs and to help them embed innovation practice into their businesses.
With over 30 years’ experience working in the creative and digital sector, Anamaria Wills is an award-winning creative business leader cited for her ‘daring artistic innovation, internationally as well as in the community and its region’.
She founded CIDA in January 2000 with the specific aim of helping to strengthen the role of the sector as a key driver of economic development. Since then, CIDA has supported the development of over 3,000 highly successful creative enterprises, both in the UK and overseas.
A passionate advocate of creativity and innovation in both social development and economic growth, Anamaria instigated CIDA’s 2008 formal alliance with EDG Inc, set up by Dr Herman Gyr and Laszlo Gyorffy of Silicon Valley. This alliance, innovative in itself, has played a critical role in the ECCE Innovation project, successfully bringing together creative practitioners from Europe to work with innovation specialists from America, reciprocally transferring knowledge and expertise and genuinely ‘walking the talk’ of the ECCE project.
Internationally, Anamaria works with transnational partnerships aimed at strengthening innovation in the creative economy. She led on CIDA’s major Competency and Qualifications Framework programme for the Singapore Workforce Development Agency, acclaimed by them as “a world benchmark”. This led to her co-designing and delivering the Professional Diploma in Creative Entrepreneurship at the National University of Singapore with colleague and CIDA Associate Lee Corner.
Anamaria has worked with creative entrepreneurs in both developed and emerging economies from Albania to Zimbabwe and continues to develop new projects and partnerships across the world.
She is a frequent guest speaker on innovation and the knowledge economy at international seminars and conferences and in November 2009, she was invited to address the audience of international Presidents and Prime Ministers at the Commonwealth Business Conference in Trinidad on the topic of Creativity and Innovation for Economic Impact. Anamaria Wills, award winning CEO of leading creativity and innovation business CIDA International, talks about the difference between creativity and innovation and how innovation is the essential life blood of companies in the 21st century.
Drawing on examples of clients ranging from the BBC to Chartered Accountancy, she illustrates how the innate creative capacity of any company’s workforce is the most vital element in a leader’s toolkit for success.
To book your place RSVP Hanifa.Gutu@britishcouncil.org or Chipo.Kanyumbu@britishcouncil.org.zw
Tel: 04 701657-62
