Creativity and Innovation
Decades of research into creativity have arrived at the consensus that creativity is not an ineffable thing. It can in fact be defined: It’s the creation of something novel and useful, a creative work, where work can be taken quite broadly to include physical objects, theorems or strategies, systems for understanding the world, stories and narratives, or music that can be performed again and again.
Novelty on its own is not enough. A creative work must also be seen as useful, helping the community move toward its goals. Defining creativity in terms of novelty and usefulness implies that creativity is contextual. Novel and useful to whom? Where? When? This relativity also implies that while the individual or team is important to creativity, other factors are also, and sometimes even more, important.
Creativity is typically seen as the work of a team or individual—the product of a group (even if it’s a group of one). The focus is on producing a creative work such as a film, novel, or fashion line—treating creativity as a thing, a noun. But we should also consider creativity as a verb, as creative acts where we engage in new ways with other teams, partners, collaborators, or even the market, as Stagekings did. While creativity as a noun is concentrated in groups—centralized creativity—creativity as a verb is spread across the firm and the ecosystem that surrounds it—distributed creativity.
Centralized and distributed creativity are not separate—they’re interdependent and intertwined. For instance, a restaurant chain’s marketing team might come up with the idea for a burger of the week, a creative work produced by centralized creativity. But turning the idea into a real-life campaign will depend on many other creative acts across the business, acts distributed among other teams and ecosystem partners. The procurement team might, for example, need to develop lightweight vendor-vetting and -onboarding processes if the burger of the week is to be successful. To accomplish these distributed creative acts, the marketing team and the groups it works with will likely need to find new ways to engage with each other.
The success of firms such as Stagekings during the pandemic relied not just on the creativity of individual groups, but on these groups finding new ways to work together as well as on the firm finding new ways to work with other firms and with the market. One could even argue that it is the creative acts that distinguish successful innovation from less noteworthy efforts. Indeed, the inability of many otherwise creative firms to respond creatively to the pandemic might be attributed to a surplus of centralized creativity and a dearth of distributed creativity.
Source: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/creativity-in-business-operations.html