ENTERPRISE INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY
Growing your business! That is typically the ultimate desire of every CEO, be it in terms of volume, market share or profitability.
Sustainable growth is achieved through differentiation. It is about launching new and innovative products, fulfilling the consumer’s (or customer’s) unmet needs and desires, excelling in service and using never before thought of business models. In other words, it is about being creative in defining every single aspect of a business and being smart in developing and implementing those new ideas.
Innovative organizations have a clear guiding vision for their activities. This is not about knowing exactly where they are going to, it is rather an aspiration of what the company believes to be the best way forward, and an understanding of the underlying values and behaviours that support that. Innovation projects and improvement programmes usually fit with this innovation vision. I have said that they usually, and not always, fit with the vision because it is vital that a vision should not be written in stone! A fast changing world implies an evolving vision, alterations to which may be triggered by the results of projects carried out by a maverick operating outside the boundaries of that vision.
Ways of managing a creative organization include:
- The reduction of unnecessary controls
- The adoption of creativity friendly reward systems and new attitudes towards efficiency and failure
- The communication of the value of creative change
- Providing the appropriate resources!
Breakthrough improvements require innovative thinking and specific ways and means of developing ideas through to action. It is important that the whole organization understands the dynamics of group creativity and creative problem solving, enabling ideas and new concepts to flow and mature, rather than stopping what’s apparently not feasible today. It is possible to build feasibility into a new idea, but it is impossible to build newness into a feasible idea!
Importantly, the vast majority will feel better at work and are therefore much more likely to contribute to new initiatives. In this way a basis for sustainable growth can be created through innovation.
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