A key objective for nearly every organization is to innovate. Business thrives on creating new products and services that add value for its stakeholders and customers. To that end, the successful organizations are those that make the most of the creativity of their employees and their partners. As Marty Neumeier observes in The Designful Company, “Creativity in its various forms has become the number-one engine of economic growth.” And in even broader terms, Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
I put together a book called Corporate Creativity a couple of years ago, and frankly it is a bit of a sleeper; chock full of incredibly inspiring content, but not a hot seller. Oh well. But I accomplished my goal; I wanted to publish an application based hands-on view of the creative process, to encourage business innovation.
Creativity is an individual mental activity, but it should also be part of a systems model. Creative thinking often challenges traditional management processes and requires adaptive and dynamic systems for success. Every company needs to be mindful to encourage opportunities for it’s employees to be creative. And in addition to internal talent and design partners, today’s open source techniques make it all the more possible tap into collective/distributed creativity and find new solutions to the most difficult of challenges.
The domains of creativity lie in action and experiment. Any organization that wants a brilliant future needs to embrace creativity, experimentation and risk taking. This is the path to cultures of innovation. So lets get moving and embrace corporate creativity; after all, as Will Rogers said, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just stand there!”.