Nkanyezi Masango
Teaching Creativity

I don't think it was an overnight realisation. I was fortunate that, in my family, there was a lot of support in terms of me doing what I wanted to do. But I think where it really originated from was growing up as an only child. 

Human beings are born creative - we're actually taught to not be creative. So if you're stunting your kid's creative spirit, you're doing the opposite of what they are naturally meant to be.

On one hand, sometimes when I see a kid in a township who's 14 years old, I see myself. I come from a township and when I look at my life and the things that I've done, there's no way I would have thought that I could live in Hong Kong and work on adidas, the Beijing Olympics, or go to London for conferences and to Cannes to collect awards.

Blackboard stands for one thing, and that's to democratise creativity. Creativity should not be about your background. It should be about your talent and your work ethic. We effectively just expose the world to the most underprivileged students and then connect them to the best people in the industry.

First and foremost, you have to really enjoy teaching. It's not something that you can do just for a paycheck, and it is one of the most important jobs in the world, I believe. To be effective, you have to think of students as individuals. And individuals have different ways of learning.

With Blackboard, often what happens is we meet students at the beginning of the year and we work with them until the end of the year. I feel like even though we're all about creativity, one of the biggest things for me out of what Blackboard does for students, is to make them confident and help them realise that they can be excellent.

People are so different. Creatives are so different but I would say curiosity is definitely a very key component because you need to want to know about things, to find solutions for things.

The creative sector is one of the most important sectors in our economy. Creativity is exactly that - we create, right? It's not like law and medicine and all these other industries. We are the people who create. We have ideas and ideas about what can make the economy thrive. If we don't protect creativity, we can lose so many opportunities to really allow more people to participate in the economy.

South African creativity is world-class. I think that we definitely have some of the best creative minds on the planet. The only thing that I feel we lack currently is creativity that is even more uniquely South African. 

We often think of creativity as something that is related to inspiration, where you can just get an idea randomly. This is true, but creativity is like exercising every day. You need to engineer it. Don't think of creativity as something that randomly happens when you're gazing out the window. You need to think of it as a practice and be disciplined about it.