The role of creativity in business.

Last week I was interviewed on the role of creativity in business. It was a thought-provoking discussion - here are a few themes that came up.

The role of creativity, design and innovation are truly intertwined – to recall Sir George Cox’s quote from his review: “Creativity is the generation of new ideas, Innovation is the successful exploitation of new ideas, design links the two, it shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers".  However, I would update this and add that design goes much further – it offers methods to collaborate with diverse teams to generate good ideas and provides methods to de-risk and implement them.

Creativity is often thought of as a divergent process to generate new ideas, but it equally is key in convergence – to connect the dots across insights, to spot patterns and to reframe the way we see things. Often this is where things stall or fail.

Sharing ideas, new perspectives and collaboration are some key factors in purposeful creativity. However, in the era of ‘the cloud’ – are too many rough ideas invisible to cause serendipitous connection?

AI is already reshaping how businesses create, innovate, and bring new ideas to market, and its used heavily in my projects but I only see it as enhancing human creativity, not replacing It.

Creative leaders range from those that are seen (or perhaps see themselves) as the “Creative Directors” or they can be the enablers of creativity in organisations to provide the conditions, methods and inspiration to create, experiment and innovate.

Thoughts? What would you add to this?