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Welcome to An Hour of Play Inc. Play is the first thing any human creates. A toddler creates play without hesitation, self-critique or apologizing for how he or she does it. Rich or poor, no matter where or when or how you grew up, you created play. We live in a world, however, that values uniformity. In measuring academic performance, for instance. To measure a child’s progress on a standard scale, teachers must enforce boundaries. Over the years, much of the creativity with which a child might approach a task is preened away. For some parents and teachers, halting creativity in children becomes a pattern. They do it out of habit, perhaps to fulfill a duty to rear children to have self-control, perhaps simply as a knee-jerk response to “exuberance.” By adulthood, most of us have forgotten how to generate good ideas and then grow them into genuine innovations. We work in a competitive market in which innovation is now a core competency. To remain competitive, we must find reliable ways to generate ideas, evaluate them, and grow them into real improvements to the way we do business. Leaders in our organizations are, sadly, much like our teachers and parents once were. They perceive all creativity as a risk and halt it immediately. Eventually leaders forget why they’re killing ideas and do it out of habit. This is hostile to innovation. How do we reverse it and make innovation a core competency? We start at the beginning, with play. Play reliably restores creativity in adults. It reaches the areas of the brain that once created play and reawakens them. An Hour of Play has created a research kit for interested participants. This kit contains: • The 15 types of play and how they show in childhood, and then what they look like later in life. • Five experimental games best suited for testing the effectiveness of play. • Guides and instructions for tracking the results of play. The research kit will be available in early September, 2017.