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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 companys 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.
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