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Does Creativity means more innovation?
I run sessions on innovation for businesses and corporate. I often get feedback from disappointed attendees about not having enough discussions about creativity. So I started to realise that many of them directly associate creativity with innovation.
To be honest, I was the same a couple of years ago. I related more creativity directly to more innovation. It is true that innovations are caused by creativity however, the importance of creativity is certainly overrated. There are many examples of creative companies that are NOT innovative.
I mean they are in the creative business, for example, advertising agencies or music studios, but the way they do business is the same as at least 25 years ago. Their business model, customer processing, revenue stream model and structure haven't changed a bit. So, being creative doesn’t lead to innovation automatically. Innovation should solve a specific problem and improves a product or process in a better or faster way.
Creativity is only one component of innovation, of course, some may argue it is the most important one, but it is not enough. If we talk about cultivating innovation in any organisation, adding more creative people do not make it happen and suddenly turns a company into a more innovative one.
There are many tools these days to categorize people to Creative and non-creative ones! Which I find useless in terms of business innovation. In fact, we need a combination of all different sorts of people in our innovation team and the exclusion of some non-creative individuals won’t help it any better.
Innovation in business is a result of the right promotion of a series of elements. First, it needs to set objectives, understand them and set frameworks for innovation in the organisation.
Generating and selecting ideas, analysing and risk management are the next parts of the innovation process.
This is an ongoing process that should be facilitated by a team leader(s) and as you can see, we need plenty of analytical thinking in this course of action.
Next time think twice when someone tries to emphasise the importance of creativity. The fact is in the innovation process we need all sorts of people and all skills and experiences are important.
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