Monica Kang wants to ‘redefine creativity’

Monica Kang is on a mission to “redefine creativity.” The founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox, a “creative leadership educational firm empowering leaders and companies,” believes that creativity is key to the work we all do, regardless of job or field, and yet too few professionals feel creatively fulfilled.

Your perception matters. Keep building and don't stop. #CreativeQuotes #WednesdayWisdom pic.twitter.com/qaxwVBsDgM

— InnovatorsBox® (@InnovatorsBox) October 19, 2016

(Kang has some dismal statistics ready, but we’re a little skeptical of the methodology involved in rating creative fulfillment).
Previously to starting InnovatorsBox, Kang worked in nuclear nonproliferation. Not the most creative field, she says. And she felt it — she felt as though she was missing something. “Unfortunately, my story was everybody else’s story,” she told Technical.ly recently. “And people were like, ‘Monica, get over it. This is life.'”
But Kang wasn’t ready to give in to that particular definition of life. So she started looking around for a way to bring creativity back into her work life and, finding nothing, decided to create her own.
InnovatorsBox, founded about nine months ago, has three main component parts: workshops, products and a kind of ‘creativity consulting’ for larger companies. The workshops, like “Joyful Hour,” “Creative Jump” and “Mindful Mondays,” are for individuals looking for inspiration and wanting to build connections. The product component, for now limited to the card game SPARK, expands the InnovatorsBox message beyond an IRL interaction. And, finally, creativity coaching is Kang’s concept for supporting this whole endeavor financially.
So what’s Kang’s message on creativity?
Essentially, Kang seems to espouse the idea that it’s not something for a privileged few. You’re not either “a creative” or not — rather, anyone can bring creativity to any position if they’ve got the right mindset. Presumably, this mindset is what Kang’s work aims to help you discover.
In just nine months Kang has held no fewer than 33 events across D.C., New York, San Francisco, Virginia and Los Angeles. And she says the response has been good — in fact, its the community validation that keeps Kang working day after day (she’s a team of one, plus two interns). She’s just getting started.
InnovatorsBox’s next event is coming Nov. 5 — it’ll be a Creative Jump creativity bootcamp held at Impact Hub. Find more information here.