What is Creativity? (And why is it a crucial factor for business success?)

Defining Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterized by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and generate solutions. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing.

If you have ideas but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative.

“Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy.” – Rollo May, The Courage to Create. 

Is this possible in business? I believe so, but you must be willing to take risks and progress through discomfort to get to the finish line.

“A product is creative when it is (a) novel and (b) appropriate. A novel product is original, not predictable. The bigger the concept and the more the product stimulates further work and ideas, the more the product is creative.”
—Sternberg & Lubart, Defying the Crowd

What is Innovation?

Innovation is implementing a new or significantly improved product, service, or process that creates value for the business, government, or society.

Some people say creativity has nothing to do with innovation— that innovation is a discipline, implying that creativity is not. Well, I'm afraid I have to disagree. Creativity is also a discipline and a crucial part of the innovation equation. There is no innovation without creativity. The key metric in both creativity and innovation is value creation.

Creativity and Economic Development:

We are living in the age of creativity. Daniel Pink, in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (2006), defines Economic Development as:
1. Agriculture Age (farmers)
2. Industrial Age (factory workers)
3. Information Age (knowledge workers)
4. Conceptual Age (creators and empathizers)

Pink argues that left-brain linear, analytical computer-like thinking is replaced by right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding as skills most needed by the business. In other words, creativity gives you a competitive advantage by adding value to your service or product and differentiating your business from the competition.

As Sam Palmisano said when he was CEO of IBM (2004), “Either you innovate, or you’re in commodity hell. If you do what everybody else does, you have a low-margin business. That’s not where we want to be.” (1)

In 2012 IBM started reinventing itself to become a design company, investing USD 100 million in hiring designers and educate 100,000 employees to become design thinkers. (2) IBM helped expand design thinking at the organization over three years to penetrate one-quarter of the entire portfolio, enabling $18.6M in increased profits. (3)

Creativity is the Most Crucial Factor for Future Success

IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study (4)stated:

The effects of rising complexity call for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organizations for twenty-first-century success.

The Creativity Gap

A 2012 Adobe study on creativity shows 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth, and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society. Yet, a striking minority – only 1 in 4 people – believes they live up to their own creative potential.

Can creativity be learned?

The short answer is yes. A study by George Land reveals that we are naturally creative, and as we grow up, we learn to be uncreative. Creativity is a skill that can be developed and a process that can be managed.

Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. You can learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination, and synthesizing information. Learning to be creative is akin to learning a sport. It requires practice to develop the right muscles and a supportive environment in which to flourish.

Studies by Clayton M. Christensen and his researchers  uncovered The Innovators DNA: Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviors that optimize your brain for discovery:

1. Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
2. Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom
3. Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
4. Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives
5. Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge

Sir Richard Branson has a mantra that runs through the DNA of Virgin companies. The mantra is A-B-C-D. (Always Be Connecting the Dots). Creativity is a practice, and if you practice using these five discovery skills every day, you will develop your skills in creativity and innovation.

“Creativeness is the ability to see relationships where none exist.”

— Thomas Disch, author, 334, (1974)

For example, you can make comparisons between your company and others outside of your industry. Questions I ask my clients’ teams in advance of our creativity and innovation ideation sessions are: What companies do you most admire and why? What are they doing that you could adopt or adapt to your own company?

Additional creativity resources:
Creativity and Innovation workshops
A curated list of creativity tools and techniques

Generative Research on Creativity

Generative research shows that everyone has creative abilities. The more training you have and the more diverse the training, the greater your creative output. Research has shown that in creativity, quantity equals quality. The longer the list of ideas, the higher the quality of the final solution. Quite often, the highest quality ideas appear at the end of the list.

Behavior is generative; like the surface of a fast-flowing river, it is inherently and continuously novel… behavior flows, and it never stops changing. Novel behavior is generated continuously, but it is labeled creative only when it has some special value to the community… Generativity is the basic process that drives all the behavior we come to label creative.” – Robert Epstein Ph.D., Psychology Today July/Aug 1996

Overcoming myths about creativity

Beliefs that only special, talented people are creative (and you have to be born that way) diminish our confidence in our creative abilities. The notion that geniuses such as Shakespeare, Picasso, and Mozart were `gifted’ is a myth, according to a study at Exeter University. Researchers examined outstanding performances in the arts, mathematics, and sports to determine if “the widespread belief that to reach high levels of ability a person must possess an innate potential called talent.”

The study concludes that excellence is determined by:

• opportunities
• encouragement
• training
• motivation, and
• most of all, practice.

“Few showed early signs of promise before parental encouragement.” No one reached high levels of achievement in their field without devoting thousands of hours of serious training. Mozart trained for 16 years before he produced an acknowledged masterwork. Moreover, many high performers achieve levels of excellence today that match the capabilities of a Mozart or a Gold Medallist from the turn of the century.” (The Vancouver Sun, Sept.12/98)

Fostering Creativity at Work: Rules of the Garage

Follow these simple rules, and you will foster a culture of creativity and innovation: These were defined by HP, which in fact started in a garage.

Believe you can change the world.
Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
Know when to work alone and when to work together.
Share – tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)

The customer defines a job well done.
Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
Invent different ways of working.
Contribute every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
Believe that together we can do anything.