Creativity is key to future of business
The world is changing rapidly and innovation is at the heart of those striving to succeed
The world we live in has changed drastically from that of 10 or even five years ago. What it’s going to look like in the next 10 years is anybody’s guess, but how businesses respond today to changi n g n e e d s wi l l d e t e r mi n e t h e i r futures.
Today’s young business leaders are looking at more than just profits and the bottom line. With their employees, they seek purpose and meaning, and want to make a positive contribution to the world and in the business environment.
Companies seeking a sustainable future are going to have to embrace the new ways of a globally connected, technology-savvy workforce. If companies and organisations are going to succeed in the highly competitive global environment they will have to embrace creativity, imagination and innovation, and encourage their employees to develop and use these skills.
Creativity and innovation are the new pathways to success. The old way of doing business, with its focus largely on analysis, data, number crunching and the bottom line, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Organisations that seek to remain competitive and at the top of their game are going to have to open up to being more imaginative and use creativity to drive innovation.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, released in January this year, states that, by 2020, creativity will be the third most important skill needed for career advancement, after complex problem solving and critical thinking, up from 10th place in 2015.
This is a significant shift. Most people in the working world shut the door on their creativity when they left childhood as the pressures in adulthood to conform, gain acceptance, belong, be right, be successful and make money took hold.
Research shows that, when we are five years old, we use 98% of our creativity. By the age of 44, we use about 2%. Unlocking that creativity is imperative for industries, companies and organisations that seek to succeed.
Old processes, procedures, tools and frameworks are failing corporates. Creativity enables us to come up with new ideas, which can affect the world and our businesses. For those who embrace it — and many companies are reluctant to for fear of failure — there is great potential for business growth and enhanced employee satisfaction.
Companies whose employees are inspired by creativity and encouraged to use their imaginations to contribute to new ideas, business solutions and creative innovation are the ones that are reaping the rewards. It is essential to improve people’s ability to use creativity and innovation deliberately so as to encourage new ideas, decisions and actions.
At the Henley Business School, we have long viewed creativity as an integral part of any MBA education, and have developed an MBA for creative activists and innovators.
We encourage students to think out of the box rather than to think in traditional ways about management. Allowing staff to be creative increases productivity, affects the school’s bottom line and also provides a competitive advantage.
Business leaders can expect significant disruptive changes to business models in the coming years, which will require companies to embrace new ways of engaging.
We need new ways of thinking to design new business and economic models.
Africa has a huge potential for this because Africans are very creative, even if this is often not documented and goes unrewarded.
New technologies have created the space for innovative thinkers, who are already tapping into their imaginations and intuition to disrupt existing industries, and this trend is set to continue.