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It's early Saturday morning, and instead of lounging in bed with a stack of newspapers, I'm in a meeting room with a bunch of strangers with sticker dots on our foreheads. The stickers come in blue, yellow, red and green - but since there are no mirrors, we don't know which colour we've been given. And yet, when we're told that the room has been divided into different coloured corners and asked to go to where we think we belong, I for some reason make a beeline for the green corner.

Awaiting me is a group of mostly middle-aged professional types clad in casual wear and looking as serious as people who have dots on their heads can. When I approach, they look right at me and, almost in unison, shake their heads. My dot is not green after all.

All this may sound like a figment of my imagination, and in a way it is. For this is the sort of thing that happens at Mindcamp, an annual, three-day creativity retreat - a sort of boot camp for the brain that draws business types and creativity consultants from as far away as Italy and Australia to a site north of Toronto.

Many describe themselves as creativity conference "junkies" - last week, some were in Georgia for the "season opener," the Atlanta Creativity Exchange. This week, they're in Italy for the annual CREA conference for "creative problem solving, creativity and innovation." On April 18, they might pop in for Mindcamp's Idea Tasting in Toronto, and in late June, they will be in Boston for the granddaddy of them all, the Creative Problem Solving Institute.

It is no surprise that the European Union has declared 2009 its year of creativity and innovation. With business and government both desperate for new ways to combat the economic downturn, inspiration has become big business. Of course, innovation and change are major components of the aura surrounding U.S. President Barack Obama. And last week, the government of embattled Ontario, which recently commissioned a report from creativity guru Richard Florida on the province's opportunities in the Creative Age, unveiled a budget with enhanced tax credits for an array of creative ventures.

So perhaps it's not surprising that "brain raves" designed to help the average citizen stir the creative beast within are becoming popular - so popular that a lively cottage industry of facilitators, coaches and "ideators" is springing up to meet the global demand for a new way of thinking.

Which is why, apparently, at Mindcamp we're all standing here with dots on our heads.

THE CREATIVITY MOVEMENT

Six years ago, Tim Hurson, author of the bestselling Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking, and Kristen Peterson, also a founding partner in a Toronto-based company called thinkx Intellectual Capital, came up with the idea of offering workshops to share their ideas about creativity and innovation.

Now, Ms. Peterson says, "creativity is a new movement." Since 2005, April 15 to 21 has been designated as World Creativity and Innovation Week - an event now celebrated in more than 46 countries. Creativity conferences and brain raves started by like-minded people are now annual events in cities from London to Seattle. The annual Toronto Mindcamp attracts participants as diverse as the director of a Mexico City consulting firm employed by Nike and Coca-Cola, marketers from Procter & Gamble and "idea generators" who have flown in from Walt Disney Co. and shelled out $550 apiece to sleep in bunk beds at an old YCMA summer camp.

"I think there's a desperation out there," Mr. Hurson says, "a growing sense that everything is changing and that we can't keep simply doing the same things we've done in the same patterns over and over.

"Companies are struggling, because people are asking for change."

Indeed, feeding your head appears to have taken on a new significance and urgency. From the mass popularity of book clubs and the spread of the salon movement to invitation-only celebrity think tanks such as the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences, and heavily promoted geek guru events such as Idea City, the creativity fest is threatening to become a regular stop for the eagerly self-improving.

Why creativity now? A significant piece of the puzzle may lie in the fact that creativity is emerging as a new business imperative. There was a time when thinking outside the box really was outside the box. Now, of course, it's atop the business agenda, and the word "innovation" is being thermo-engraved on the brass plates of corporate mandates.

Now, even classically left-brain business schools are starting to teach creative thinking and innovative decision-making. At the forefront of this trend is the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, which is actually pairing its students with creative types in a pilot project called Designworks.

"Back in the seventies, a company could come up with an idea, like the IBM 360, and it could ride on that for the next 20 years," explains Roger Martin, Rotman's dean. "Now, you have to have great ideas over and over again."

Another factor is globalization. "In the old days, Ford and Chrysler were both in Detroit," Mr. Martin says. "They were in the same town, staffed by people who came from the same milieu, who took the same approach, staring at each other from their offices across the street.

"The likelihood that you were going be hit by something new coming from somewhere else, thought up by someone with different constraints, a different way of looking at things and a different cost structure was extremely low. Now, of course, that is no longer the case."

At Disney, where chief executive officer Bob Iger has cited creativity as one of three key factors critical to the company's sustained growth and success (and, come to think of it, in-house "imagineers" became part of the corporate culture even before 'ol Walt went off to that merchandising house up in the sky), the pressures of globalization have only upped the ante.

"If you're thinking of it, there's a good chance that right now, somebody else in India is on it already," says Jayson Aquilanti, Disney's manager of creative development.

"The old ways just don't work any more," he adds, which is why he and his creative team must "constantly dwell in the possibilities and think about things in a different way."

Which is not a bad description of being at Mindcamp. Mornings begin with qi gong - a "meditation espresso" designed to help bleary-eyed early risers shake off their self-consciousness, concentrate on their breathing and move really, really slowly. Then it's off to breakfast, during which announcements are introduced with the shake of a tambourine, followed by a group brain teaser or "creative jolt" that finds everyone, say, trying to pat their heads with their left hands while hopping on their right feet, and whistling the Love Boat theme.

There are three or four workshops to choose from for each 90-minute slot on the daily schedule, so table talk tends to focus on whether Innovation Theatre, Idea Noise, Graphic Boot Camp or Living in the Now is the one not to miss.

At night, everyone gathers around a campfire with their new friends to sip wine, trade business cards and whirl trippy LED light strips around in the gathering dark as a flamenco guitarist plays.

Some have brought their kids; some are sleeping outside in canvas yurts. Everybody wears crazy name tags that they've personalized with stickers and markers. Looking around, I realize it's like summer camp for aging hippies.

Not everyone is a midlifer, but it's hard to stop thinking about Mr. Hurson's reference to "refirement, not retirement" - the boomer yearning for reinvention of the self as another root cause for the sudden trendiness of inspiration. Whatever the demographic, certainly "ideators" have a thing for catchphrases.

BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

A workshop called Idea Noise sees us broken into groups to brainstorm a hypothetical advertising campaign. Mine has some very clever people, including real-life creative directors. But in the end, camp is just like the real world: Everybody listens to the cutest, most assured guy in the group while those who are less attractive or missing a Y chromosome may as well be wallpaper. So much for the endless possibilities of the imagination.

At lunch, I sit with my new BFF, a woman from Disney's Orlando office who likes to dress with a theme in mind (today's: black and white polka dots) and is clearly having a lot more fun than I am. "Usually I am the only nutbar," she says. "But here, I really feel like I've found my peeps."

In a seminar called Open to the Source, the leader, a thoughtful Briton named Richard Lang, reminds us that we cannot see our own heads. Not a particularly novel observation until you witness first-hand 70 people peering at each other through tiny picture frames. Afterward, I find that the strange, whale-like noises I'd heard were from people blowing into "hydrolophones," which looked like oversized kazoos, and spouted water on the lawn outside.

During a session called Serendipity Soup, leader Mary Harvey, a high-energy improv comedienne with a lot of teeth and dangly earrings, asked us all to "go stupid," because "it's in the stupid, silly things where all the richness is. Stop editing your life. The more you expose yourself to what's out there, the more inspiration you're going to get!"

First, she had us draw a cartoon visualizing a current dilemma, pin it on our chests, then walk around the room giving entirely random "advice" to each other. Then she handed out some magazine clippings and tiny objects and gave us 10 minutes to create a visual representation of our earlier dilemma. In minutes, I had surprised myself by assembling something from a couple of photographs of a balancing elephant, a desert canyon, some fuzzy wire and Monopoly men and, strangely, was starting to make a lot of sense. I felt inordinately pleased by my brilliant creativity - until she asked us to pass our favourite piece of our creation to the person on our left.

That night around the campfire, after a couple of glasses of wine, I ask some fellow Mindcampers whether it's really possible to "teach" creativity.

Diane Eastham, an artist and educator turned creativity coach, and her fellow artist and educator friend, Virginia Stephen, now director of the liberal studies program at the University of Alberta, vigorously asserted that creativity isn't just something that some of us are born with.

"Some of us may be more comfortable with expressing their creativity than others, but I firmly believe that everyone is inherently creative," says Ms. Eastham, who now mentors her clients' creative development using her own four-step process, the stages of which she has precisely identified as preparation, incubation, illumination and implementation.

Disney's Mr. Aquilanti says our problem with creativity begins at school. "If you were to ask a room full of kindergarten kids, 'Who in this room is creative?' 99 per cent of them would raise their hands. By the time they are in junior high, that number would drop to 50 per cent, and by the time they are adults, it would dwindle to about three who would raise their hands."

In his opinion, this is largely because of what is being taught and the methods used.

Roger Martin of Rotman agrees. "So much of what we are doing now is unteaching - unteaching the notion that the existing data-based process is where all the great value is created, validating the idea that this more creative kind of thinking is actually useful and helpful, and helping students get over the idea that, if they are not doing something that is immediately productive, what they are doing is something wrong or bad."

Which makes a person wonder just what creativity is - merely permission to let your mind wander? Is a refreshed mindset really the same thing as creativity? Certainly the word "create" implies some sort of end result.

As for my three-day pit stop "dwelling in the possibility," I learned that it didn't take much to reconnect with my inner creative child.

But the real revelation was just how many people are out there searching for inspiration - and just how inspired it is to come up with something like Mindcamp to give them the opportunity they seek.

Karen von Hahn is a columnist for Globe Style.