The Future Problem Solving Program International (FPSPI) is one of the most popular internationally implemented programs to promote creativity, problem solving, and future interest and orientation in adolescents. However, a recent evaluation of the program found that students reported that they gained other lifetime skills, beyond the program’s goals, in personal, academic, and career experiences (Treffinger, Selby, & Crumel, 2012). But, does the FPSPI help students have accurate perceptions about creativity, and about the concepts of a creative pupil and a creative teacher? It is assumed that having accurate perceptions of creativity fosters a personal investment in creative skills. So, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the FPSPI on adolescents' perceptions of creativity and creative people in the school setting. The intervention program was administered to 77 students, who ranged in age from 12 to 17; the control group included 78 students with equivalent characteristics. In pretest and posttest assessment moments, students completed the scale Creativity and School – Perceptions of Students (Morais & Azevedo, 2011), composed of 25 Likert-type items organized into the dimensions of Accurate Perceptions and Erroneous Perceptions about creativity. Results show statistically significant differences between the experimental and the control group for accurate perceptions of creativity, which are favorable to the experimental group. These results are discussed in order to plan future research with the FPSPI, and to consider educational implications.

Essential to discovering and cultivating new ideas is the act of extinguishing the sources of old ideas that have failed to inspire solutions. New ideas can then be accessed in territories far removed from old hunting grounds.

‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as escaping from old ones’. (Economist, John Maynard Keynes).

At its core, creativity is much less a generative act and far more an act of recognition. This recognition skill lies in the ability to look at something apparently unrelated to a problem and discover there an exciting connecting pathway to a solution.In helping businesses solve difficult and persistent problems, I have discovered that it is not any lack of ideas that prevents even very bright people from finding solutions. Instead, one of the biggest roadblocks to new and creative solutions is not conjuring new ideas but in ridding the brain of those already embedded. As Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution through natural selection, put it, ‘To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact’.My whole ‘Cruising to Aha’ process mimics Charles Darwin's three-step Natural Selection Process: extinction, mutation, and selection. In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, Darwin says, ‘All creatures adapt to an ever-changing world by a process called Natural Selection... As species adapt from generation to generation, nature selects those better able to survive than... their competitors’. This article concerns itself with the first of this three-stage process: extinction.