Creativity, Innovation and Solutions: Part One.

As Stamm rightly puts it, “Creativity is the act of coming up with ideas”, and not just creating them on paperwork but rightly devising methods good enough to utilize such ideas that are thus evolved. The act of generating and communicating meaningful new connections, using the new connections to open up new opportunities or possibilities, and that guide us to develop and select alternatives to problem solving, is very important to organizations, individual entrepreneurs and societies, in general. (Stamm, 2008, page 2). The creative process, usually has about four stages of generating knowledge and awareness, the incubation period, the time for idea generation, and the evaluation and implementation process. All creativity activities take one of the three different paths of provocation, divergence and convergence – which are spelled out in taking actors out of their linear paths, generating a number of ideas from the many concepts and approaches available, and finally, filtering, while processing the ideas, to create alternatives. (De Bono, 1995).

This study is of a particular interest to me as a would be entrepreneur. The fact is entrepreneurship is about spotting opportunities and doing that involves creative thinking, consequently translating creativity and innovation into real value in real business context. In the entrepreneurial environment, the abilities to be creative and spot any or more opportunities, coupled with innovation and invention, to create a competitive advantage, is prerequisite to building a successful business enterprise. As seen during this research with my group, sources of new ideas could be internal and external – such as research and development, marketing and sales, purchasing and production, universities and research institutions, consultants and customers, exhibitions and competitors, to mention but a few.

Importance of Creativity and Innovation

In the course of this research with my group members, I have come to learn a lot about creativity, innovation and problem solving, and all of these will be reflected here. Some of the most recognized principles (theories) and practices of creativity that have helped shape the business world today, may have come to play by grace, accident (Van Andel, 1989), cognitive, association (Koestler, 1970) and personality. Also, knowing that every good business idea must be desirable of the target customers or markets that it is going to serve, feasible in terms of making it available with minimal risk, and viable – which is having high margins with break-even time that is relatively short and relatively low capital involvement and requirements. There is scarcely any business without a model weaved into its strategic planning and management.

In the case study of Airbnb, their business model which is applauded today, has come out of the rumbles of the old business methods with their clogged wheels, at a time when people and even professionals had given up on the possibility of creating something like that or seeing the model as something that would work well in the business environments of the world.