Creativity Wins – Finding Business Opportunities Through Creativity

Welcome to Part 3 of our March Opportunity blog series:  Finding Business Opportunities Through Creativity

In an IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries, creativity was ranked as the most important factor for success.

Creativity is characterised by making connections between unrelated concepts, generating solutions, finding hidden patterns and an ability to see things in a different way.  And it can lead to brand new opportunities for your company.

The challenge for many firms is how to foster creativity, how to encourage risk-taking and a culture that is open to ideas.  No matter the size of your company, how well it is performing or its industry, here are a few ideas to improve your team’s creativity to help you to forge new paths.

1. Carve out some time for creativity

Schedule in some brainstorming activities and make the sessions places where people are free to come up with ideas without fear of being criticised.   Employees will clam up and sit stony-faced if they are worried about being ridiculed for suggesting something that others may think is dumb.  Just get the ideas out in the open and make sure that everybody is heard.  Bring in employees from all areas of the business so you can profit from the diverse expertise of people from varied backgrounds.

2. Develop great questions

Asking questions piques curiosity and stimulates creativity because they force us to look for solutions.  There are lots of great questions you can ask, but here are a few:

– What could we add to a current offering to make it even more extraordinary?

– If we set up a competitor to us what would they look like?

– What ideas can we borrow from other industries and apply to ours?

– If we went into a different market what would that be?

You can even pose questions unrelated to your industry.  For example, a computer software company could ask: “If we were able to dream up a new type of jam, what would that jam be?”

A creative exercise such as this takes you outside of your industry and forces you to think about a number of different areas unfamiliar to you, such as taste, marketing, labeling and where the product should sit on shelves.  In so doing, you are tuning your brain into creative ways of thinking that you can then use for your own business.

3. Encourage risk-takers

Disruptive ideas don’t come out of sticking to the status quo.  Offering something truly novel takes courage, and people will not come forward if they feel their career will be harmed by suggesting a risky prospect that turns out to be a failure.  Give employees the space to make mistakes and the organisation time to learn from them.

If people are playing it safe all the time, you are likely to stagnate.  Yes, there is a cost associated with taking risks, but there can be a bigger one in not taking them.

Creativity and Enterprise

Creativity is at the heart of the spirit of enterprise allowing organisations to solve their problems and unleash new ideas into the world.  Develop a culture of creativity to see opportunities all around you.

At Natural Training we help clients inject fresh thinking into their business and provide them with opportunities to show their creativity – with fabulous results. Contact us today to explore what we offer.