Creativity and Innovation

It has long been recognized that creativity and innovation are necessary for bringing forth the change required to obtain the competitive advantage.

Carr and Johansson (1995) note that

Very simply, we define creativity as the generation of ideas and alternatives, and innovation as the transformation of those ideas and alternatives into useful applications that lead to change and improvement. We've found that, in today's business environment, an essential element to an organization's success is adaptability. You must be able to manage at the speed of change, and that takes creativity and innovation.

Nonaka and Kenney (1991) note that

Increasingly, corporate competitive success is hinging upon the effective management of innovation. ... For us, innovation is a process by which new information emerges and is concretized in a product that meets human needs. The healthy firm is a negative-entropy system which constantly creates new order and structure in its struggle to survive and grow. ... To remain competitive any firm must constantly be creating new strategies, new products, new ways of manufacturing, distributing, and selling

Ostrenga, Ozan, McIlhattan, and Harwood (1992) note that

Those companies that are effective at rapidly bringing innovative new products and services to the market have gained a huge competitive edge in today's business world.

Deming (1993) notes that

The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict needs of the customer, give him more. He that innovates and is lucky will take the market.

De Bono, E. (1992a) points out that the successful companies soon will not only have to be competitive, but they must also create value monopolies. He shows how creatitivity is necessary to generate those value monopolies.

There have been, are, and will continue to be many approaches toward the creation of creativity and innovation.

For example, general systems theory (Von Bertalanffy, 1968) is concerned with the ability to map things which exist in one system into another system. It is a way of bringing knowledge or technology from one system and using it in a second, possibly quite different, system. This can create radical change in the receiving system.

The Japanese have developed and refined methods such as affinity diagrams which are excellent for creating the new language necessary to think in and about new ways.

Function analysis , the original basis for value engineering and the unrecognized basis for business process reengineering, is an excellent tool for defining the current product or process in a form which allows one to ask "How could I do it differently?" The answers to this question lead to the necessary new strategies, new products, and new ways. Systematic diagrams are an implementation of function analysis.

Lateral thinking is a tool for serious creativity (de Bono, 1992b). In lateral thinking one moves down a path and suddenly takes a jump to the side. That jump, like the punch line of a joke, places one on a parallel but unseen and very different path, which in retrospect, is extremely logical. This phenomena seems to be very similar to crossovers and mutations in genetic algorithms (Goldberg, 1989) and to the complete change of phase space and associated equilibria as a control moves through the critical value in catastrophe theory (Thom, 1975).

There are even those who believe that creativity is linked to omnipresent morphogenic fields of biological origin (Sheldrake, 1995).

TRIZ is a structured means of invention upon demand

Csikszentmihalyi (1988) notes that

... what we call creative is never the result of individual action alone; it is the product of three main shaping forces: a set of social institutions, or field, that selects from the variations produced by individuals those that are worth preserving; a stable cultural domain that will preserve and transmit the selected new ideas or forms to the following generations; and finally the individual, who brings about some change in the domain, a change that the field will consider to be creative. ... Creativity is a phenomenon that results from interaction between these three systems. Without a culturally defined domain of action in which innovation is possible, the person cannot even get started. And without a group of peers to evaluate and confirm the adaptiveness of the innovation, it is impossible to differentiate what is creative from what is simply statistically improbable or bizarre.

Although most psychologists define creativity relative to a society, using living systems theory, we realize that creativity can exist relative to the organism,the group, the organization, the society, and the supranational system levels. That is, someone may be creative relative to their own person (the organism level) without being generally recognized as creative at a group, organization, society, or supranational system level, and so on for each of these levels. This perception provides creativity with a categorical measure of recognition.

My personal perception is that creativity is in the meta-world. To create one must either have or define a domain of action which one understands to the point of also understanding the forms and patterns which underly the domain of action. To me, creativity results from changing these foundational patterns in some way. It is strongly related to the genopersistation of the domain of action. To create, one must either have or genopersist the domain of action. That is, one must bring forth or sustain the domain of action until no longer of value. A new domain of action is created by conceiving the domain. This conception is the putting together the patterns of a new domain. It is marketed to a system level. The system level evaluates the new forms and patterns. The system level then designs (refines) the forms and patterns and then produces them for availability at that system level. The findings are deployed (communicated) to the system level over time. The system level operates the accepted forms and patterns as a practice and provides some type of support for them. The forms and patterns are evolved over time through redesign of both the forms and patterns and their practice. This is what we see in established domains of action. When the forms and patterns are no longer of value to the system level, they are retired (removed from thought and practice). The whole of this genopersistation is managed by some type of organization within the system level.

However you create the creativity and innovation, it will be necessary for business survival to do so by the dawn of the twenty first century. However, Lewis (1996) makes it very clear that too much innovation can destroy competitive advantage because people can handle only so much at one time.

References

• Carr, D. K. and H. J. Johansson (1995). Best Practices in Reengineering, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York NY.
  Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). "Society, Culture, and Person: a Systems View of Creativity," in Sternberg, R. J. , ed. . The Nature of Creativity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

  de Bono, E. (1992a). Sur/petition: Creating Value Monopolies When Everyone Else is Merely Competing, Harper Business, New York NY.

  de Bono, E. (1992b). Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas, Harper Business, New York NY.

  Deming, W. E. (1993). The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Engineering Study, Cambridge MA.

  Goldberg, D. E. (1989). Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading MA.

  Lewis, T. (1996). "The Limits of Innovation," Computer, April, pp. 7-9.

  Nonaka, I. and M. Kenney (1991). "Towards a New Theory of Innovation Management: A Case Study Comparing Canon Inc. and Apple Computer Inc.," Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Vol. 8, pp. 67-83.

  Ostrenga, M. R., T. R. Ozan, R. D. McIlhattan, and M. D. Harwood (1992). The Ernst & Young Guide to Total Cost Management, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, USA.

  Sheldrake, R. (1995). A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, Park Street Press, Rochester VT.

  Thom, R. (1975). Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models, W. A. Benjamin, Inc., Reading MA.

  von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, George Braziller, New York NY.

Bibliographies

Creativity and Innovation Bibliography

Surfing the Web

Creativity and Systematic Innovation

Creativity Web Page

Institute for Social Inventions

Inventors

Mind Mapping FAQ

Mind Tools: Problem Solving and Analytical Techniques

Newsgroup: misc.creativity

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