Creativity and Innovation – The Keys to Success!

Creativity and innovation are fundamental to long-term growth and success!

Success requires that you not only create sufficient value for your customers, but critically, that you capture enough of that value for yourself!

This involves identifying opportunities, diagnosing problems and developing and realising valuable commercial solutions.

Central to this process are the two closely related activities of creativity and innovation.

Together, creativity and innovation form the bedrock of entrepreneurship. They are the keys to your income and wealth!

While creating and sustaining a successful business requires more than creativity and innovation alone, it doesn’t exist without these two central factors.

Creativity is the cognitive activity that results in novel or unconventional ideas that haven’t previously been known or used.

It’s the process through which original and useful ideas are generated.

Creativity is the key ‘raw material’ used in the process of innovation (the generation of the initial ideas that ignites the innovation process and those needed to overcome the barriers faced in commercialising them).

In contrast, innovation is the application of new ideas in the process of creating new value.

While innovation is dependent upon creativity and the ideas that flow from it, innovation is not simply a matter of having new and creative ideas. Those ideas must be valuable, commercially viable and implemented to result in new value.

Innovation is about understanding and managing the process of creativity – then marshalling the resources and capabilities needed to transform the ideas, into commercial reality.

Creativity and innovation are inextricably linked. They are a core component of the entrepreneurial process and the keys to growth and long-term success.

Creativity and innovation are highly interactive and interdependent activities that lie at the heart of the value creation process and your ability to capture a share of this value.

They’re also intimately linked to the learning process, knowledge accumulation and the competency development, needed to commercialise ideas capable of sustaining your competitive advantage.

Given the significance of creativity and innovation to the realisation of an entrepreneur’s dreams and aspirations, both activities must be proactively managed.

They shouldn’t be left to chance or mere wishful thinking if you want to secure your future.

Managing and developing personal and organisational creativity and innovation capabilities, involves:

1. Managing mindsets and dispensing with the key misconceptions surrounding creativity and innovation
2. Building creativity, competency and knowledge
3. Establishing and nurturing an environment that supports creativity and maximises intrinsic motivation
4. Building innovation management systems capable of transitioning creative ideas into commercial outcomes

Creativity is the source of the idea stream that flows into innovation and the value creation needed to create and sustain your income and wealth!

It’s not about the single breakthrough idea, but creating an environment where creativity can flourish and ideas are systematically marshalled through the process of innovation.

Without the appropriate environment to encourage novel ideas and the process to commercialise them, your business will be left behind.

Competitors with more aggressive growth aspirations will erode your competitive advantage jeopardising your future income and wealth.

If you want to ensure that you don’t lose the competitive race, choose to build creativity and innovation into the DNA of your business!

If you would like to learn how your business can grow and thrive through creativity and innovation, give the team at Fortitude Business Consulting a call on 1300 551 040.