Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation

'In this highly readable and thought-provoking book, Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin show how play helps animals to find novel solutions and sows the evolutionary seeds for human creativity. They argue that being able to 'break the rules' in a protected environment, which is what play does, generates new ideas (creativity) and new ways of doing things (innovation). By looking at the conditions in which humans are at their most creative, they make a major contribution to what we might do to be even more creative than we are.' Marian Stamp Dawkins, University of Oxford, and co-author of An Introduction to Animal Behaviour (2012)