24
Are you a creative business innovator?
The exercises in this book provide examples of how you can become a better business innovator, but their main purpose is to provide inspiration and a foundation for you to develop your own creative processes and routines. By putting your own knowledge into these exercises, you can develop new processes and routines and hone your creative processes for your business. Because it's impossible to know too much.
You have now almost finished reading this book. Congratulations are in order! Hopefully, by reading it, you have taken many strides along the path towards becoming more creative and thus more successful in your business.
The aim of this book has been to increase your point score on the introductory test of your potential as a creative business innovator. Do you remember what your score was? Go back and refresh your memory.
Table 24.1 Self-test for creativity
| Statement | Points |
| 1. I know a lot about people's behaviour, drives and motivations. | … |
| 2. I know a lot about economics and business. | … |
| 3. I know a lot about demographic trends (for example, the effect of motoring tolls, population changes and people's leisure activities). | … |
| 4. I really feel that I've achieved something when I have thought of a new idea. | … |
| 5. Developing new ideas is one of my favourite pastimes. | … |
| 6. It is challenging to develop new marketing strategies. | … |
| 7. I don't try to stay on the safe side when developing business ideas and programmes. | … |
| 8. I prefer to think unconventionally in business and programmes. | … |
| 9. I am a risk-taker when I promote ideas. | … |
| Sum of points | |
Because now it's time to do the same test again (Table 24.1) to see (1) if you have improved your knowledge in the areas that are essential for being creative, (2) if you've been motivated to think in new and different ways and to bring creativity into your work processes, and (3) if you have understood that it is necessary to take more risks.
If this book has served its purpose, your score on the test should be higher than it was the first time. In Part II of this book, we talked about filling the box with knowledge about people's behaviour and their likely responses to marketing. In Part I we also discussed how economics and business are intimately connected with innovation and creativity. These two areas of knowledge combined are at the foundation of all business enterprise. All business is about putting together an economically feasible offer that will appeal to consumers and fit with current or probable future behaviours. As you add to your knowledge in these areas, your capacity for innovation and creating new business opportunities will grow. Add to this the knowledge that you must keep up to date with demographic trends, and you will be open to new opportunities and will be able to develop new ideas continuously.
Only the beginning
In Parts I and II of this book, we looked at what makes people creative, and found that a creative individual takes more risks than others, but that the risks in themselves are relatively small. Knowing this will hopefully help you to become a greater risk-taker, because it is the quantity and not the size of the risk that matters. In Chapter 4 (Why is creativity so important?) we also discovered that the real risk lies in fact in not being creative and innovating your business. We saw evidence from several different areas concerning how important it is to be creative; for yourself and your career and as a human being, and for businesses and society as a whole.
You've seen why it is in fact more important to think inside rather than outside the box. But that in doing so, it's also important to expand the box, which you saw was possible in at least four ways, and to fill the box. Hopefully you gained some new insights and started to enjoy the process of thinking innovatively. This enjoyment and inner motivation to create and innovate is extremely important for the creative result, which we could see from the studies to which we referred.
In the final part of this book, there were exercises designed to help you to shake the box, and hopefully you found out how easy it can be to develop new ideas for products, concepts and platforms. With many solutions come many risks, but also many opportunities for success.
Your journey to becoming more creative and a more successful business innovator obviously doesn't stop when you put this book down. On the contrary, this book is intended merely to get you started. It has given you some new arguments that you can use with yourself and in relation to your environment in stressing why it is important to be creative in business. It demonstrated how many opportunities there are to achieve creative results: firstly, through the insight that innovations do not need to be particularly great or particularly novel (but they must be meaningful); and, secondly, through the exercises in Filling the Box and Shaking the Box. Another aim of this book has been to motivate you to continue to develop on your own and make creativity and innovation part of your everyday working life. The exercises in this book are examples of how you can become a better business innovator, but their main purpose is to provide inspiration and a foundation for you to develop your own creative processes and routines. By adding your own knowledge about businesses and industries with which you are familiar, and insights and ideas that you get continuously from observing demographic trends, you can develop new processes and routines and keep on honing your creative processes.
This probably won't be the last book you read about creativity. Hopefully you will read many more books on the subject and, even better, about how we humans function. Because it's impossible to know too much.
The more puzzle pieces you have, the more puzzles you can make from them – or rather shake out. It is said that pigeons moved their heads all the time in that peculiar way because otherwise they can not see properly. When it comes right down to it, they are actually quite smart.