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How Innovative Creativity Is Often Confused With Innate Ingenuity
This article was originally published on 21 June, 2022 by Aditya Dedhia, at the age of 18.
Technological and industrial advancements have made our lives easier and more comfortable, and whilst it may be adaptive to take the easy road, this very amenity may end up sending businesses into superfluous stagnation.
The Creativity Stigma
For many, they would refrain from calling themselves the creative type. It appears to be that in the modern business world, this term has gained negative connotations from notable business analysts. such as Harvard Business School's professor Theodore Levitt who, in his 2002 article titled 'Creativity Is Not Enough,' said that ideation is relatively abundant and implementation has become scarce, "Many people who are full of ideas simply do not understand how an organisation must operate in order to get things done," (HBR). Although Levitt's reasoning is sound, the idea that all ideation counts as creative thinking is controversial.
What motivated this article is the preface that not all creativity is the same. The argument that 'creativity is the killer of innovation' is gravely misunderstood. It is not that creativity is the problem; it is that the essence of creativity, in Levitt's words, has become myopic. If creativity excludes practical utility and feasibility, creativity can be extrapolated to a blank piece of paper.
Adaptive versus Innovative Creativity
Adaptive creativity refers to improving existing solutions. Innovative creativity refers to creating new solutions. The issue with Levitt's argument is that it inexplicably promotes the former in the name of practical utility and feasibility. The danger of this creativity mindset is that it is counterintuitive to the very idea of innovation and undermines an organisation's competitive advantage.
It is not that organisations have the freedom to choose one over the other as both are required. Adaptive creativity allows businesses to stay aligned to the ever-changing market norms and is a softer, more sustainable form of innovation. On the other hand, innovative creativity will enable businesses to remain relevant and resistant to mass industrial changes. However, instead of a strategic approach, many businesses utterly discard innovation. Whilst there is nothing inherently wrong with continuing adaptive creativity, without innovative creativity, businesses can quickly set themselves up for stagnation or, even worse, bankruptcy, as in the notable case of Kodak.
Case Study: Kodak
Kodak is a company that was once an industry leader in photography and imaging. The company created some of the first digital cameras and invested in new technologies such as OLEDs. However, despite these advancements, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. So what went wrong [1]?
Innovation is the result of creativity put to work to produce something new or improved. It is a process that includes ideation, feasibility, and utility. Creativity and innovation are not mutually exclusive terms. Both are required for businesses to stay ahead of the curve and avoid stagnation. Kodak's case is a prime example of what can happen when a company does not invest in innovative creativity. The company had become too comfortable with its position in the market and failed to invest in innovative creativity. The company was too focused on adaptive creativity, and, as a result, became blind to the emerging and industry-disrupting innovations that revolutionised the digital photography market. By the time Kodak realised what was happening, it was already too late. Burying their heads in the sand and digging for incremental refinement seemed to them, productive at the time, yet it was this exact myopic execution that led to its downfall. The company had lost its competitive edge and filed for bankruptcy.
The Actual Killers of Creativity
All of us are born with a capacity to ideate. As we dream, we recompile our memories and create an idea so abstract that we may even second guess reality. The human brain is good at ideation and, more often than not, a lot of nonsensical ideation.
What drives Levitt's argument is that innovative creativity is often difficult. The creativity stigma is a real problem in the business world. Too often, companies focus on adaptive creativity and do not invest enough in innovative creativity. This can lead to stagnation and even bankruptcy. However, what is probably the principal cause of this perceived 'difficulty' is more likely to do with the people responsible for creativity more than the actual process of creativity itself.
It is not that businesses lack the ability to generate new ideas or should forgo creative tenacity, but rather that businesses should restructure creativity into the right hands. Levitt implies in his argument that innovative creativity is somehow intrinsic to skilled employees of the organisation. Sure it would be absurd to have unskilled employees having their sole job descriptions as 'idea-generators,' but is it so that skilled employees imply securing a solid creative direction? Now, there is a certain level of skill required to ensure that creativeness does not become irrational, but it is the same upper levels of management who are the so-called 'creativity killers' by concerning themselves with the operational feasibility of ideas before attempting to figure out how change could be implemented.
Who Should Drive Creativity?
It is commonly heard that children tend to have higher levels of creativity than adults. If you dig deeper into the reasons, a nurturing environment that allows for the development of different skills will produce a more creative population. The legacy of the industrial revolution has lived on with the radicalisation of mass-production techniques, which Levitt warned about in his book 'Marketing Myopia' (Levitt, Theodore). For one, this has produced a more autonomous workforce driving redundancies and structural unemployment, and secondly, leading to a less equipped workforce for generating innovative creativity.
So, when it comes to who should be innovating, the answer is more complex than simply assigning upper managerial layers or assigning a dedicated team of 'idea-generators.' What needs to happen is, quite frankly, a paradigm shift in approaching creativity.
Step One: Prioritise Internal Training
Is it so that all the Jony Ive's of business are born creative geniuses? Contrary to popular belief, creativity can be learned and, like all skills, require practice to be honed. The issue lies in that businesses tend to cast off their works as mere giftedness and live under the presumption that external hiring is the only way to encounter such skill. Businesses can be better equipped if they look within their organisational walls and prioritise adequate employee training through techniques such as job rotation which allow for employees to have a diversified skills portfolio and a deeper understanding of the organisation as a whole.
There is a direct correlation between being well-versed across all business functions and the quality of the business proposition generated. The truth of the matter is that just as a writer that lacks command over the language will be less equipped to be creative, the same way an artist who lacks the techniques and tools will lack creative ingenuity in his art.
Step Two: Redefine the Work Environment
Businesses such as Apple tend to have module-based organisational structures that allow them to focus on what matters, setting an environment up for creativity. Just as presentation matters for customers, it is equally as crucial for developing an environment that nurtures creativity in employees.
If you take a moment to observe the most grandiose creative geniuses across domains such as humanities and liberal arts, you will find a common thread being that they are usually sequestered or work for prolonged hours in what psychologists refer to as the flow-state. When even creativity in the so-called gifted cannot be forced, why should businesses measure productive output by the number of ideas that simply sound good in theory?
For the businesses that are blinded by the quantitative data and continue to cheapskate their employees with lacklustre and insufficient tools to work efficiently, creativity will suffer, now not just for technical reasons which are under the organisation's control, but also as a personal desire to be creative. According to Pink's theory of motivation, employees lacking a sense of 'purpose' within the organisation will not work to their full potential or devote themselves wholeheartedly to the organisation's mission and vision. After all, why should employees bother when their presence and passion are not wholly valued? This is a slippery road to go down. When employees are disjointed from the interests of the organization's well-being, the organisation is as good as a ticking time bomb.
Fringe benefits go further than employee retainment. An excellent illustration of this idea is Google which encourages intrapreneurship [2] by adopting a laissez-faire management style. Employees have dedicated time off for conceivable projects, satisfying all three P's of Pink's motivation theory as employees have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This method does not inhibit creativity and allows employees to test the potential viability of their business propositions instead of merely generating impractical ideas.
Conclusion
The solution to innovative creativity is more than meets the eye. Businesses should adopt a proactive approach to creativity by redefining their organisational structure and corporate culture to cultivate a self-fulfilling innovation cycle. Only when businesses have adequately provided for these two essential pillars can they move on to address the issues of creativity from an external perspective.
Footnotes
[1] Read the full story on Kodak's bankruptcy by Forbes here.
[2] Read more about intrapreneurship by MIT's Sloan School of Management here.
Works Cited
Levitt, Theodore. "Creativity Is Not Enough." Harvard Business Review, HBR, 1 Aug. 2002, hbr.org/2002/08/creativity-is-not-enough.
Levitt, Theodore. Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
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