Creativity is a wonderful tool and an absolutely essential one in the special events industry. Event managers are constantly being challenged to come up with events that “surpass last year’s,” are “bigger and better,” and are “totally different and exciting.” Television, the Internet, newspapers, a multiplicity of magazines in all fields, and easy international travel have given people access to other ideas and views of the world like never before, thereby raising their expectations for dramatic, unusual events to unprecedented levels. The event manager must rise to this challenge by generating a spark of ingenuity that will launch the event during its conception. This exciting interactive session will examine how to generate that spark. It will look at what creativity is and the internal process of creative thinking, it will propose guidelines to assist in the creative process (i.e. developing the best creative environment), and finally it will review some of the most popular techniques for encouraging creative thinking. Participants will take away an understanding of the process of creativity plus new ways of seeing and solving the conceptual challenges in events.