Creativity expresses the play of invention and the reward of application that becomes innovation.
Creativity imagines and then proceeds to simulate alternative futures by exploring the boundaries of present reality and looking for holes of intrigue in which to play and follow the paths of knowledge. Play creates the explorative space, and simulation and application provide the discipline of bringing imagination forward into reality. The best scientists and technologists interweave these capacities like the spiral helix of DNA, or the wave and packet bursts of the new multi media and broadband optical communications future, that will soon be as ubiquitous, accessible and familar as writing, signage and dial tone. The National Research Council of Canada has always had a creative bent. It has created music synthesizers, imagined the future of animation on computers, given scope to the inventors of buckminster fullerenes, applied lasers to switching for high speed optical telecommunications and enlarged the field of view of the planners of the next generation of broadband fibre optic systems through wave length division multiplexing.