Can someone do my Week 3 discussion 1 in BUS 637 Entrepreneur/Intrapreneur!?

The_Greenhouse_Approach_Cultivating_Intrapreneursh..._----_CHAPTER_EIGHT_-_Creativity_.pdf

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C H A P T E R E I G H T

Crea t i v i t y

I N T H E 1 9 6 0 s , scientific researchers George Land and Beth Jarman de- vised a creativity test for NASA, to aid in the selection of innovative scientists and engineers. NASA considered the study to be a success for their purposes, but the scientists were left wanting more information about creativity and where it comes from. Are people born with creativity? Or, is it learned?

The Land and Jarman creativity test studied the subjects’ ability to think of innovative solutions to problems. They administered their test to 1,600 five-year-old children. Incredibly, ninety-eight percent of those chil- dren were deemed “highly creative.”

The scientists re-tested each subject five years later. In the second test, only thirty percent of these same children scored in the same range. When tested at the age of fifteen, the number deemed highly creative had dropped to twelve percent.

When 280,000 adults were given the same test, only two percent tested as highly creative.

Based on these results, Land and Jarman determined that “non-creative behaviour is learned.”

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Creativity is one of the core attributes of intrapreneurs. They continually strive to imagine and re-imagine a better world.

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Anand, Chitra. The Greenhouse Approach : Cultivating Intrapreneurship in Companies and Organizations, Dundurn Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ashford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5329791. Created from ashford-ebooks on 2024-07-12 00:42:07.

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PART TWO: THE MODEL

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It isn’t that adults lack creativity. We all have the creative gene hard- wired in our brains. Th e problem is that, like any muscle, it has to be stretched and exercised daily or it will shrink and atrophy. An important goal of the greenhouse approach is learning how to exercise the creative muscles we all have.

T H E V I T A L I N G R E D I E N T

If creativity is an essential quality of our humanity, the question is, is it important for businesses and companies? Most people associate creativity with the work of artists and designers, but the truth is, cre- ativity is crucial in all aspects of life — especially business. Creative thinking is essential in the business world. Look at it this way: you may not have the skills to paint a Mona Lisa, but you probably have more than enough creative appreciation for it as a work of art. Its beauty and craftsmanship engages you at a deeper and more emotional level (I hope!) than a quarterly report or monthly sales summary might. We all have it, okay; what we need to do is trust it. And that takes some creative-thinking rewiring.

A creative person will look at problems and situations and be able to consider them from a fresh perspective, a perspective that suggests unorthodox solutions. As we have seen, intrapreneurs are thinkers who dissect, reverse-engineer, and re-imagine ideas and concepts, procedures and processes, and products and markets. Creative thinking empowers people to look at a problem or situation from a new perspective, using imagination and curiosity to evaluate the issue at hand. It fosters the ability to make connections between things that may not seem to cor- relate and to fi nd interesting points of intersection.

Even if you are not a designer or artist, you can still be a creative thinker. Regardless of the discipline you’re in — human resources, oper- ations, fi nance — we’re all in the business of solving problems. And how do we solve problems? By applying creative thinking. Almost everything we do involves some element of design and creativity.

A fascinating study was commissioned by Adobe and Forrester Consulting in 2014 to assess how creativity infl uences business

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Creativity

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outcomes.* Senior managers from a broad sample of industries were sur- veyed to qualify and quantify the types of impacts creativity has on busi- ness results. Companies in which a culture of creativity is embraced, the report concluded, outperform on key business indicators such as market share, talent acquisition, and revenue growth.

It should come as no surprise that businesses practising creativity are more innovative than those that are not. When creative thinking is encour- aged in a company, either through brainstorming informally or as part of a more structured process, the company will surpass its competitors.

For businesses to survive throughout the next industrial revolution (4IR — Fourth Industrial Revolution)** and beyond, they must stay ahead of their competitors. Both relevance and creative thinking will be required to do this. Both of these qualities are core to intrapreneurship.

Knowledge alone won’t generate innovative ideas. You need creative thinking as well. Even when innovations are envisaged, creative thinking is required to refi ne those innovations until they’re just right. Th e greater your curiosity and depth of knowledge, the more combinations of ideas you can come up with, the more innovative you can be.

Neil Blumenthal is co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, an eye- glass company that specializes in off ering aff ordable alternatives to expen- sive eyewear. Warby Parker not only off ers designer eyewear at a reasonable price, but the company is socially responsible. For every pair of eyeglasses purchased, a pair is donated to those in need.

Creativity and social responsibility is the essence of Warby Parker’s en- tire business ethos. Th e central motto of the fi rm, according to Blumenthal, is “learn, grow, repeat.” Warby Parker encourages its employees to engage as much as possible with social causes and community initiatives; for instance, it off ers a fully stocked free lending library for employees, regular skills training, and internal conventions. But Warby Parker also asks staff mem- bers for their creative ideas. Every week, employees submit their innovative ideas, which keeps everyone in a creative mindset.

* Forrester Consulting, “Th e Creative Dividend: How Creativity Impacts Business Results” (Forrester Consulting, 2014), landing.adobe.com/dam/downloads/whitepapers/55563. en.creative-dividends.pdf. ** Klaus Schwab, � e Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2016).

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PART TWO: THE MODEL

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“Creativity is a business imperative,” Blumenthal says. Creative thinkers are the dreamers of the world. Th ey are the people

who pose questions like “What if?” Creative people have been classifi ed as happier and generally more open-minded than other people, and the good news is that almost everyone has the potential to be creative.

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