Welcome. My name is Sandra Langeveld. This week, we will talk about creativity, and I have the pleasure to introduce you to this interesting topic. You may think of creativity in an artistic way. Making a painting, composing music, or performing a dance. But creativity is also needed in business, known as business creativity. So don't worry, we won't be using these today. Creativity is a necessity to achieving an innovation. Take a look at the next examples. Maybe you would have done your groceries by horse today if it wasn't for someone to have the creative idea to replace horses by engines. This is the first car ever, a real revolution back in the era of coaches. The next innovation, Google Glass, also started with the creative idea to turn the shape of a computer into glasses. These were just some examples of creative ideas. In this video, we will take a closer look at the definition of creativity, and explain the relationship with innovation management. We will also give you a short introduction into divergent and convergent thinking, both needed to come up with the creative idea. There are many definitions for creativity. How would you describe creativity? Do you see creativity as an ability of a person? A set of skills that makes one person more creative than others? Or, do you approach it in a psychological way? An intellectual thought process that takes place within a person. Or do you see it as something that comes when you feel free from threat and pressure? Something that can be stimulated by the environment, for example, by an inspiring leader. All of these aspects of creativity are interconnected. The characteristics of a person and the environment influence the creative process and leads to a creative outcome. In business, the end product can be an idea for service, product, or process. A common definition for creativity and management sciences is, creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas. Although the two are highly related, novelty and usefulness are two different concepts. Think of novelty as the creation of a great, original, and cool idea because of distinctive characteristics. For example, the products shown on the slides. The Segway, a real new idea, a two-wheeled, self-balancing battery vehicle. You cannot compare this product with any other products. Usefulness in business is about possibility to commercialize or implement the idea. Take WhatsApp, for example, a very useful application to exchange messages. The difference with other services is that the messenger and the receiver can have different devices, for example, iPhone and Androids. This makes it a multi platform and is therefore very useful. Novelty and usefulness must both be seen from the eyes of the beholder. So, an idea is still novel even if someone else already invented it without you knowing, or in a different context. And an idea is still useful for your company even if another company has already applied it. For example, if you introduce open offices to a traditional company it is still new and useful for that company, and therefore a creative idea. In developing new products, we need to take the customer into account too. Something can be new for the company but what if the customer already knows it? This is not good. How can we define the relationship between creativity and innovation management? Creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas, and innovation is the successful implementation of these ideas within an organization. In other words, every innovation starts with a creative idea, and a good thing is, everyone can be creative. I want to illustrate this by showing you that even animals can be creative. Take a look at this crab. It uses materials from its environment to hide from predators. This is very creative. In order to be creative, you need to be able to see things in new ways or from different perspectives. The crab sees his environment, not only as a place with animals and plants, but as a collection of decoration to camouflage his body. It takes many ideas to find a creative idea. For example, what can I do with this pen? Yes, I know I can write with it. You can use it as a pointer, but what else? If you give yourself more time you will come with answers less obvious. You can use it to decorate your hair or maybe to scratch yourself. You need a lot of ideas to come up with creative ideas. Quantity will lead to quality. This brings me to divergent thinking. This is the process or method used to generate multiple related ideas for a given topic or solutions to a problem. It typically occurs in a spontaneous manner, such that many and unexpected ideas are generated in a short period of time. Children are very good in divergent thinking. Give them a box and they will turn it into a car or a castle, but for adults, divergent thinking is quite hard. Our brain consists of many cells that are connected among each other. These connections are the building blocks of our thoughts, ideas, and memories. In order to come to breakthrough ideas we need to break these patterns in our brain and create new connections. There are different techniques to give our brain a workout, for example, brainstorming. We will talk about this in video four of this week. Another technique to become more like a divergent thinker is to force yourself to combine two unrelated subjects into a new concept. They say snowboarding was invented like this. Two unrelated concepts snow and surfing put together into a cool idea There are three measures for divergent thinking. First, fluency, which is the number of ideas per time unit, the higher the better. Second, originality, the degree of newness of the ideas. And third, flexibility, the variety of the ideas. Often measured as the number of categories you can fit the ideas in. After the divergent thinking process you will have a lot of ideas, but not all ideas can be implemented. There will not be enough resources to implement the ideas and there will be bad ideas too. So you need to make a decision. After the process of divergent thinking has been completed, ideas are organized and structured using convergent thinking. During this phase, ideas can be combined and categorized. The best idea can be chosen afterwards. It is important that you make sure you give every option a fair chance. Do not dismiss novel or original ideas too fast. Some ideas may not be workable, but take your time to improve those ideas. It is also important to keep your objectives in mind. This was the first video on creativity. Remember, a creative idea is both novel and useful. And to come up with a creative idea, you need many ideas. And you need to be able to see things in new ways from a new perspective, just like you did when you were a child.
