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“Invention is a set of strategic thinking tools that you can teach, learn, and practice, just as you can with other skills like cooking, acting or sailing.”
- Evan Schwartz, in JUICE

This week (November 14 – 20), there’s a global conference taking place. A conference for our collective future.

It’s called Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) is dedicated to unleashing ideas and encouraging entrepreneurship among young people. It’s “the world’s largest celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth and expand human welfare.” 

Innovation, inventiveness and expanding human welfare? That’s something we can get behind.

Invention + Entrepreneurship = The power to change the world.

So much of entrepreneurship is about invention—inventing solutions to problems, be they big or small. According to Evan Schwartz, author of JUICE: The Creative Fuel that Drives World-Class Inventors, thinking like an inventor requires a certain perspective—a perspective that any one of us can get into. To think like an inventor, ask questions like:

• “How does this work?
• Why does it work?
• What’s wrong with it?
• How can it be improved?
• What else is needed?
• Who says it needs to be this way?”

We venture that these are exactly the kinds of questions asked by entrepreneurs—and social entrepreneurs, especially. Whereas the notion of “invention” is often relegated to contexts like biotech, computing, medicine or electronics, Schwarz contends that being inventive is a skill that can be learned in any discipline. And we think this idea that inventiveness can be learned fuels an event like GEW. (If you need an inventive boost, we highly recommend Schwarz’s book, JUICE.)

Participate in GEW.

Visit unleashingideas.com
Watch the GEW Livestream 
Check out the #GEW2011 hashtag on Twitter
Follow @unleashingideas on Twitter

Wondering how big GEW really is? Check out this infographic: