More than ten years ago, employers identified workplace creativity as a quality that would rank among the top five most valuable workplace skills in the coming years. We’ve now lived through that decade and seen it to be true.
Progressive companies aren’t looking for “yes” women and men. In most industries, from transportation to education to retail, the companies earning success, visibility, and the power to influence rise above the expected to nurture growth, knowing that creative people can:
- Identify, articulate, and solve problems
- Integrate knowledge across different disciplines
- Originate new ideas
- Channel their unending curiosity
- Take reasonable risks
- Tolerate ambiguity
- Communicate new ideas to others
“Creativity in products, services, procedures, and processes is now more important than ever. It is needed equally in the established enterprise, the public sector organization, and the new venture,” wrote Olivier Serrat in a 2009 paper.
High-performance companies are turning traditional management practices on their heads in favor of workplace creativity cultivation. Preventing creativity was once a way to exert control on employees. Today, the focus is on growing the expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation that is at the core of creativity.
For companies to change management practices has been no small feat. A transformation has taken place to move them from Closed Innovation Principles to Open Innovation Principles.
| Closed Innovation Principles | Open Innovation Principles |
| The smart people in the field work for us. | Not all the smart people in the field work for us. We need to work with smart people inside and outside the company. |
| To profit from R&D, we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves. | External R&D can create significant value: internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value. |
| If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to the market first. | We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it. |
| If we create the most and the best ideas in the industry, we will win. | If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win. |
| We should control our IP, so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas. | We should profit from others’ use of our IP, and we should buy others’ IP whenever it advances our business model. |
When businesses obsess over proprietary knowledge, chances are good that they practice Closed Innovation Principles. It’s a telltale sign.
The advantages held by the most innovative businesses, those that embrace Open Innovation Principles, is revealed in recruiting, training, and work style. These companies “ recruit and retain highly skilled and trained personnel, give them access to knowledge, and then encourage and enable them to think and act innovatively,” wrote Serrat.
How then do we harness creativity? “A systems approach to management understands innovation as one part of a wider context, appreciates interconnections, and can conduct systematic analyses of how a problem interacts with other problems, parts of the organization, projects, etc. Management fosters coordination across these interconnections and stresses integration rather than compartmentalization.”
Bottom line, to harness creativity is to adopt a workplace system that elevates creativity.
In future blog posts, we will look at companies that have thrived by doing just that.
Have you been a part of workplace discussions about the role of creativity? Share this article with your colleagues and keep the conversation going!
Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash