Innovation by SIT

When it comes to research around “Creativity”, 3 standard approaches prevail: The first approach is the Person approach. This approach suggests that innovation is a characteristic inherent in naturally creative people. Either you’re born with it or you’re not. Some of us have it, and some of us don’t. Managers who subscribe to this view tend to recruit innovative people into the company and assume that these creative people will be the standard bearers of creativity within the organization.

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The second approach is the Process approach. This approach suggests that there are particular processes that promote creativity. Take Brainstorming for example. This method says that if you create a process which gathers people from different disciplines, and you have someone to facilitate the discussion, and suspend judgment when coming up with ideas, and put emphasis on the quantity not quality of ideas, and build on the ideas of others, then you’ll get to some good ideas upon which you can build your work plan. Similar to Brainstorming, there are a variety of other methods which you can adopt in order to reach creative ideas.

The third approach is the Product approach. This approach suggests that creativity can come from anyone i.e. that the source for creativity isn’t the person or the process, rather it’s the characteristics of the creative product itself that serves as the source of successful creative new ideas. Try this: take a sample of (let’s say, ten) successful innovative products from different categories and examine what they have in common. Ask yourself what it is that makes them more “creative” while other products seem less creative? If you succeeded in finding commonalties between the creative products that do not exist in the non-creative ones, you have discovered something important. The next step would be to turn these shared characteristics into a “tool” that could help you create similar successful yet creative ideas in the future. This would be a Product approach pathway for getting to creative solutions.

Generally speaking, you can find most of these approaches in any organization: a combination of “creative people”, processes aimed at encouraging new initiatives, and analyzes of current successes with the goal of creating templates for future success. However, you can always identify one of these approaches as being more dominant than the others. For example, creative departments in advertising agencies often tend towards the Person approach - they look for people “born creative”. What’s funny is that they woo creative people from other companies to come and work for them by boasting how creative their people are. How does it work in your company? And more specifically, what do you think: Can you learn to be more creative?