“Normal is … sitting at a desk all day, under artificial light, eating machine food, hemmed in by four walls, with a plastic plant, a telephone, a Rolodex, a sense of déjà vu and a manager who says you better start ‘thinking outside the envelope’” - Ellen Goodman (1945)

Research by CIMA (The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) on the role of creativity in business success presents assessments provided by 830 senior business and finance executives. Many of them are members of CIMA, representing prominent organisations in five global regions. These are the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, the European continent and the UK.

Worldwide, there is a growing recognition that in the last wave of competition in the 1990s, organisations of all sizes were converging on similar, though exacting standards of costs, reliability, functionality and quality for goods and services alike. In the current wave, at best, these factors can ensure survival; they are no longer differentiators that ensure growth. This is because consumerism is becoming a major movement. Customers now want benefits that go well beyond economic criteria to include social, ethical and environmental considerations. These are becoming increasingly important as customers create their own value systems, aided and abetted by growing affluence, individualism and regulation. As a result, creativity - manifesting through product, process or organisational innovations - has become one of the key avenues to achieve differentiation.

Creativity is about generating new ideas; innovation is about their implementation. In this context, innovation not only relates to products and services offered in the marketplace; it also covers business processes and organisational structures that underpin them at the workplace. As such, they involve major breakthroughs resulting from new discoveries or incremental changes that lead to continuous improvements.

Key drivers and inhibitors of creativity

In today’s global marketplace, factors promoting creativity are both external and internal to organisations.

The main external drivers of creativity are customer expectations, competitor and quality pressures, branding pressures, shareholder expectations and globalisation of markets. Other external drivers include branding pressures and the need to retain existing customer base or find new markets.

Internal drivers arise from shorter product cycles, accelerated innovation and purposeful activities that lead to continuous improvement.

As for the inhibitors of creativity, some are cultural - they are embedded in the psyche of the organisation. Others are structural - they are embedded in the physical processes and the work environment in which they are carried out.

Cultural inhibitors are caused by the lack of a can-do mindset: “we’ve tried it years ago and it didn’t work”, the tribalism syndrome: “that’s the way we do things around here”, and risk aversion: “we’ll think about that at a later date”. The main structural inhibitors are time pressures on managers to deliver quick results, employees not having enough time or space and the lack of a coherent vision on creativity.

Promoting creativity
Organisations are adopting three sets of business practices that promote a culture of creativity. Together, these practices:

• spell out the values of such a culture
• incorporate them into systems such that they are implemented into day-to-day activities
• motivate employees to adopt these values such that they become part of day-to-day behaviours.

• communicate success stories
• give high profile to suggestions of new ideas
• give autonomy and space to employees
• build creativity into reward and recognition criteria
• work with external suppliers and customers
• convert ideas into actions

• creating new business models
• making employees, clients and suppliers feel that their ideas are valued
• understanding the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the business
• building successful implementation teams
• ensuring that they have the right skills and behaviours providing realistic levels of resource for converting ideas into action.

• Recognise that consumerism is a major movement in its own right. It requires innovations in products, services, processes and structures of incremental and well as break through nature.
• Remember that although it may be difficult for everyone to be creative, workable creativity is open to all. It is a random explosion, often born of restlessness. The key is to understand its drivers and inhibitors at corporate and individual level.
• Ensure that there is a clear alignment between business values, physical systems and employee behaviours that collectively produce a culture of creativity.
• Seek new business ideas and opportunities continuously, while orienting every employee towards markets and customers.
• Work closely with suppliers and customers to learn new ideas, while creating fast-track systems that convert ideas into action.
• Give your employees the freedom to learn by experimentation and perform against stretch goals, while tolerating mistakes within certain parameters.
• Appreciate that people may work for money but they live for recognition. Communicate success stories across the organisations, while giving open, honest and real-time feedback to those who come up with new ideas that add value.
• Remember that leaders make a huge difference. Ensure that the leaders at all levels in your organisation are equipped with skills that are relevant to:
  • encouraging creativity
  • overcoming barriers to creativity
  • converting ideas into profits.
• Measure the results of creativity by using direct indicators based on standardised ratios or indirect indicators based on asset classes.
• Reward creativity by building a good employer brand, providing autonomy and space, and offering money and non-money incentives.