Course on Creative Imagination Development

I have just announced a new course on Creative Imagination Development which will take place on April 27, 2007 in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
This course is a bit different from other courses I offer. It does not specifically target on technology or business areas, instead it deals with general development of creative skills. Imagination is an esential part of creative work, and to create interesting and breakthrough ideas we need to use it to its full extent. People with developed creative imagination can better foresee and react to future changes thus staying ahead of others, and easier come up with out-of-the-box ideas.
But can creative imagination be developed? I believe that like any skill, it can. Every person is given an in-born ability to create, and the question is how we use this ability and how we develop it. When I was young I was going for fencing, and it took us two years of training to start fencing properly before we were allowed to compete - these two years were needed to develop fencing skills. The same with all other skills, including creative imagination.
During the course, I will also introduce several techniques to generate out-of-the-box ideas on the basis of developments by Altshuller - "the father" of TRIZ. He and his associates put considerable efforts to understand how we can use our creativity most effectively and boost our creative performance. In fact, Creative Imagination Development was always a part of advanced TRIZ education.
But this is not a TRIZ course, although it incorporates some basic TRIZ ideas like principles of creative change, Ideal Final Result, Contradictions, Multiscreen Thinking. The difference is that they are much quicker to learn and can be used everywhere: from technology to writing and film making.
For those who are interested, the course details are available at:
http://www.xtriz.com/Training/cid.htm