A comment on Creativity and Innovation
In today’s business environment, competitive advantage becomes less and less about having unique products and/or suppliers. Rather, competitive advantage is the ability to identify and capitalise on information. Understanding what the customer wants and acting on it before anyone else, or learning a smarter way of utilising web 2.0 technology before the competitors. The two main keywords here are learning and development – that is the organisation’s capacity to learn, and the organisation’s capacity to use that learning.
There are many different concepts, theories and practices that are thought to explain parts of how to either increase the organisation’s capacity to learn, or how to use learning into developing new products or processes. We can refer to the Learning Orgainzation, Organisation Learning, Knowledge Management and so on. Two of the more well known concepts for the public are creativity and innovation, to such extent that we often refer to these as management fads. What is for certain is that there is a massive industry of consultants built around creativity and innovation – with a few serious and credible entities (e.g. Edward De Bono and IWP), but with the majority presenting quick fixes, hence becoming fads.
Now this is not going to be a post where I moan about the abundance of self proclaimed management gurus out there, don’t worry. But even amongs the more credible professionals out there, there is not always a clear cut definition and distinction between creativity and innovation. Based on my own research and experience, it is useful to view creativity as mental processes and behaviours that the individual engages in, whereas innovation is often understood to be the structures and processes at work that facilitate creativty. The “management gurus” do have one thing right, though. Everyone can be creative. However, not everyone can express it effectively, and even fewer are able to implement creative ideas. Rather than focusing on whether a person is creative or not, we need to address whether the environment, be it the personal sphere or within an organisation, allows for creativity to take place! It is not enough to hire creative people if your organisation doesn’t have processes and structures conducive and supportive for creativity to take place in the first place.
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I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.