Inspiration
Capturing the creative potential of your organisation

'Essential reading for anybody who wishes to better understand the vital and complex role creativity plays in successful business'. Terence Conran

Inspiration is about how to capture and manage the creative potential of organisations. This is not a book about personal creativity, but rather how organisations can best develop and manage a creative environment. Its premise is that organisations consist of people who have undoubted potential to think in new ways and yet are often denied the opportunity to do so. The goal should be to create an organisational structure, culture and series of systems that encourages the conditions in which creativity can flourish. This book shows managers how to achieve this.

Why is creativity important?

The answer to this is simple, creativity generates significant competitive advantage in three key ways. First by offering clear differentiation through the delivery of valuable originality. It is increasingly difficult to develop and sustain points of difference in a business offer. Only those organisations that have embedded innovation practices into their business will have the capacity to keep redefining their industries and maximising their value.

Second, being creative communicates positive brand attributes to stakeholders so strengthening a company’s intangible assets. An estimated 85% of the market value of a business, on average, is intangible: the ideas, relationships and brands that a company owns. To maximise this intangibility, the organisation must capture the full intellectual capability of its people. As Dr John Warnock, founder of Adobe says, “success is when good ideas come from everywhere in the company.”

Finally creativity strengthens the organisational environment. Creative organisations contain motivated, committed and knowledgeable people. Creative companies are enjoyable, stimulating and challenging work places. Not only does staff turnover decrease, thereby lowering costs and increasing the level of embedded organisational knowledge, but such organisations also attract the highest calibre of new recruits. In such a context creative behaviour becomes the norm.

How to create the right conditions for creativity

There is a perception that freedom is a prerequisite for creativity. However, our findings demonstrate that at both the thematic and the practical level, good creativity also requires managed boundaries. For something to be creative it must deliver originality and value. Unrestricted freedom might deliver great art or literature, but it does not deliver effective business solutions. People in a business context need focus, boundaries and support. They must not be told what to do, but they must know what not to do.

We introduce the importance of achieving managerial balance. For organisations that tackle problems from a creative perspective the boundaries of creativity need to be curtailed and for those that are overly control led, the boundaries need to be extended. Getting this right is subtle and is the source of much conflict between the organisations that commission creative work and designers, art directors and, product developers. We identify the key forces that create tensions in an organisational environment and show how managers can balance them to ensure the creative dynamic is optimised.

A key point for the organisation is to understand itself; to know what its essence is. Inspirational organisations that are good at creativity, such as Quiksilver, Tate Modern, Aardman Animations, Aston Martin, IDEO, Sony and Volvo are also very strong at understanding the nature of their brands. They use the brand essence as a point of departure and as a point of accountability. The brand is the template against which creativity is judged.