Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs's wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.
Could be correlation without causation.
I think that creativity is a lot like cognitive ability. People have a certain amount of talent at birth, I doubt that a person can learn to "be creative" any more than a person can learn to "be intelligent."
I agree that you can exercise your ability and improve your skill at creative problem-solving, but that's not the same as increasing innate creativity.
