What is creativity?

Creativity is the bringing into being of something which did not exist before, either as a product, a process or a thought. You would be demonstrating creativity if you: Invent something which has never existed before Invent something which exists elsewhere but you are not aware of Invent a new process for doing something Reapply an existing process or product into a new or different market Develop a new way of looking at something (bringing a new idea into existence) Change the way someone else looks at something In fact, we are all creative every day because we are constantly changing the ideas which we hold about the world about us. Creativity does not have to be about developing something new to the world, it is more to do with developing something new to ourselves. Creativity can be used to make products, processes and services better and it can be used to create them in the first place. It is expected that increasing your creativity will help you, your organization and your customers become happier through improvements in your quality and quantity of output.When we change ourselves, the world changes with us, both in the way that the world is affected by our changed actions and in the changed way that we experience the world. “Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being…creativity requires passion and commitment. Out of the creative act is born symbols and myths. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness-ecstasy.”

There's A Critical Difference Between Creativity And Innovation

There’s a lot of confusion surrounding creativity and innovation. “Creative types,” in particular, claim that creativity and innovation can’t be measured. Performance, however, demands measurement so you can identify what success looks like. In a world that changes every two seconds, it’s imperative that companies figure out the difference between creativity and innovation.

You better believe they’re different.

Creativity vs. Innovation

The main difference between creativity and innovation is the focus. Creativity is about unleashing the potential of the mind to conceive new ideas. Those concepts could manifest themselves in any number of ways, but most often, they become something we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. However, creative ideas can also be thought experiments within one person’s mind.

Creativity is subjective, making it hard to measure, as our creative friends assert.

Innovation, on the other hand, is completely measurable. Innovation is about introducing change into relatively stable systems. It’s also concerned with the work required to make an idea viable. By identifying an unrecognized and unmet need, an organization can use innovation to apply its creative resources to design an appropriate solution and reap a return on its investment.

Organizations often chase creativity, but what they really need to pursue is innovation. Theodore Levitt puts it best: “What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e. putting ideas to work.”

Managing Innovation

Because creativity and innovation are often confused, it’s long been assumed that you cannot force innovation within an organization. It’s either there, or it isn’t. The introduction of a common language for innovation — design thinking — enables organizations to better measure milestones in their innovative efforts. 

In order to employ design thinking, it’s necessary to understand it as a system of overlapping spaces, rather than a set of process steps to move through. Those spaces are: inspiration, during which the problem that motivates solution-finding is identified; ideation, the process of generating and developing ideas; and implementation, the activities that enable a creative idea to move from the drawing board to the marketplace. Any design thinking-based project may loop back to an earlier space more than once as a team explores, develops, and implements its idea.

Design thinking provides a consistent approach to defining challenges. It helps organizations identify problems before they even begin the brainstorming sessions most associated with creativity. Now, organizations can actually see what they were missing when previous ideas didn’t reach market sustainability.

Using design thinking, organizations can capitalize on creativity by paying attention to the life of the idea after its initial development. To be of value, applied creativity must always lead to innovation — linking a great idea with an actual customer need (or, better yet, the needs of a whole market!). The use of design thinking in this manner also demands the guidance of engaged leadership.

Leaders are critical to the success of any group’s long-term innovation strategy. It’s their job to ensure that innovation is consistently pursued and their employees don’t settle into business as usual. They set the tone for what is, and is not, possible in the business through their attention and action.

Companies to Model

Organizations serious about fostering innovation have to wrestle with two main issues: risk-taking and failure aversion. All innovation involves risk, and all risks include the possibility of failure. Failure should never be seen as a black mark; it is a learning experience. Leaders and their organizations cannot be afraid of failure — or they will never incorporate the innovation they need to truly meet customers’ needs. Design thinking offers a path to risk-taking that’s manageable, repeatable, and driven toward maximizing the effectiveness of the new idea.

Of course, the very term “innovation” connotes something new and different. Still, paying attention to companies that are consistently innovative in their industries is always a good practice. Consider these companies that use the principles of design thinking to achieve their strategic goals:

1.Proctor & Gamble embraced innovation under former CEO A.G. Lafley. During his tenure, P&G’s value increased by more than $100 billion. In 2000, it had 10 billion-dollar consumer brands; today, it has 22.2.Kaiser Permanente is the largest not-for-profit health provider in the USA. Kaiser’s National Facilities Services group has, for over five years, been working on the Total Health Environment, a program applying design thinking to every aspect of Kaiser’s operations, from medical records to color palettes. The results speak for themselves: improved patient health, satisfaction, soundness of sleep, speed of healing, and cost control.3.Square is particularly associated with innovation since its plugin device helps millions of mobile vendors and small business owners. No longer are they confined to cash payments or expensive credit card machines. Square noticed that the economy was quickly becoming paperless and provided customers a way to keep up.

Creativity is important in today’s business world, but it’s really only the beginning. Organizations need to foster creativity. Driving business results by running ideas through an innovation process puts those ideas to work — for companies and their customers. Creativity is the price of admission, but it’s innovation that pays the bills.

Andrew (Drew) C. Marshall is the Principal of Primed Associates, an innovation consultancy. He lives in central New Jersey and works with clients across the U.S. and around the world. He is a co-host of weekly innovation-focused Twitter chat, #innochat; founder, host, and producer of Ignite Princeton; and a contributor to the Innovation Excellence blog. He is also providing support for the implementation of the Design Thinking for Scholars model with the Network of Leadership Scholars (a network within the Academy of Management).

Colors Creativty.

Creativity Starts From

Research has shown that the development of the potential and the character formation of a child starts at the tender age of 2 and begins to cement at the age of 9. In Little Big Pre-School we will help our children build a strong foundation which would help them realise their dreams in future. 

This would be achieved through passionate teachers, stimulating environments, a dynamic curriculum and a commitment to excellence. Thank you for considering Little Big, where Big Dreams for Little Ones begin. 

What is a life without creativity?

I believe a life free from creativity is a life free from joy. Our creativity is the essence of who we are. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to the world to feed from our personal well of inventiveness and imagination. But what can you do when your inner artist eludes you?

Here are 24 creativity quotes that may bring her out to play.

1.“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense” – Pablo Picasso
2.“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try” – Dr. Seuss
3.“True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found” – Eckhart Tolle
4.“Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it” – Dee Hock
5.“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – Walt Disney
6.“Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up” – Pablo Picasso
7.“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not’?” – George Bernard Shaw
8.“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams
9.There is no use trying,” said Alice. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll
10.“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” – Vincent van Gogh
11.“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it” – Salvador Dali
12.“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts” – Rita Mae Brown
13.“Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people” – Leo Burnett
14.“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.” — Henry David Thoreau
15.“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things” – Ray Bradbury
16.“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own and other people’s models, learn to be ourselves and allow our natural channel to open.” — Shakti Gawain
17.“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will” – George Bernard Shaw
18.“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou

19.“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes

20.“From 30,000 feet, creating looks like art. From ground level, it’s a to-do list” – Ben Arment

21.“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” – Pablo Picasso

22.“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star” – Nietzsche
23.“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” – Albert Einstein
24.“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” – Osho
(That last one is my personal favorite.)

So live life a little more today, dance, sing, play and love. See the beauty in life and you will bring out the beauty from within.

The Disney Creative Strategy

When it comes to creative planning, it can be hard to find the right way to transform imaginative thinking into concrete business strategy. You need to dream big in order to come up with possible ways of solving a particular problem. At the same time, you need to be able to focus on the detail needed to put your plan into action successfully. Getting the right balance between these two aspects is a real challenge, but you can learn a lot about how to do just that from one man, who not only mastered the technique, but used it to create a legendary billion-dollar empire.When you hear the name 'Walt Disney' what comes to your mind? For lots of people it will be that famous animated mouse he created, and the joy he's brought to millions of people through his films. But many consider Walt Disney to have been just as much a business genius as a creative one. Closer inspection shows that much of his success was thanks to having a very specific approach to realizing his dreams.

Known as the Disney Creative Strategy, it was originally formulated by Robert Dilts, aNeuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) expert. One of the goals of NLP is to model the thinking strategies of successful people. Dilts defined this particular strategy after analyzing Disney's methods for turning his dreams into reality. He details the strategy in his book, "Strategies of Genius: Volume One", published in 1995.
In this article we'll explain the Disney Creative Strategy, and show how you can use it to realize your own ideas.
The Disney Creative Strategy:
The Disney Creative Strategy is a tool for brainstorming and developing ideas. It involves using three sequential roles, or thought processes, namely.

Why We Struggle With Creativity 10 Reasons

1. Your brain is always putting out fires.
Cognitive science research tells us that our brains are equipped with sensitive threat-alert systems (of which the amygdala is a significant part), and these systems are older than we are, evolutionarily speaking. In our brains, the limbic system–home of the well-known fight or flight response–is ready to click on with a micro seconds’s notice. That’s a good thing. The problem is that it’s ready to click on with a micro second’s notice. As with many paradoxes within our brains, the good is also the bad depending on context. Because we are so neurobiologically predisposed to looking for the next fire, it’s challenging to carve out a “safe space” for creativity.

What can we do about that?  The video at the end of this article, featuring the inestimable creative genius John Cleese, offers some quality suggestions.

2. Chunks of time are hard to come by.

Even when we can outwit our brain’s threat-alert system, it’s still difficult to find what the late, great management philosopher Peter Drucker advised we must find to be effective in any capacity: “chunks of time.”  Spurts of time riddled with interruptions aren’t conducive to creativity because each time our focus is wrecked, we struggle to get back to the point we’d reached in our creative “flow” (a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).  Creativity isn’t like restarting a blu ray disk and picking up exactly where we left off. A great deal of energy went into getting to that place, and we must expend more energy to get into it again.

Cleese’s video also offers suggestions for this problem, but in short — we must set firm, impenetrable parameters for being creative. If you think you’ll need two solid hours to get there, then make those two hours nonnegotiable.

3. The “self-efficacy” problem.

Pioneering psychologist Albert Bandura devoted a large part of his expansive career to figuring out how people can develop a necessary sense of self-efficacy–the outcome when accomplishment yields compounding confidence in one’s abilities. The irony that Bandura uncovered is that we only get there when we’ve experienced enough failure to demonstrate the difficulty of our eventual accomplishment. Another way to say that is — if it were easy, none of us would have a problem. But creativity isn’t easy, and we’re going to stomach failure–probably more than we think–before achieving something that starts depositing confidence in our cerebral bank accounts.

The thing to remember is that confidence compounds with time, and most people give up before they start earning a return on their investment.

4. The “governing scenes” problem. 

Two more great psychologists, Silvan S. Tomkins and Gershen Kaufman, devoted much of their careers to figuring out why shame wields so much power in our mental lives.  Tomkins (who is the father of “Affect Theory” and “Script Theory”) coined the term “governing scripts,” and Kaufman built on his work, later coining the term “governing scenes,” which are the mental images of past experience that our brains conjure when we come across a “trigger” for that experience.

The tricky part is that our brains conjure governing scenes automatically–they arise from the unconscious. So when we experience a creative failure, our brains toss out vivid images–not just vague memories, but “scenes”–of past failures.  Kaufman saw this as the pivotal dynamic that makes shame such a potent emotion — it’s not just an externally triggered feeling, but also an internal saboteur.

What can we do about that?  Look to Albert Bandura’s discoveries (#3 above) and get back to the hard work of overcoming, and overcoming, and, oh yeah, overcoming. In other words, don’t quit, because in all likelihood you are giving up far too early.

5. The functionary temptation.

“So, what are you going to do with that?”  Tough question to answer for anyone trying to be creative, because there probably isn’t an answer. What we seem to have a hard time getting our arms around is the fact that there also doesn’t need to be an answer.  What would a world driven by purely functionary concerns look like?  Is that a world you’d want to live in?

The answer to this one is self-evident: stop asking the functionary question about everything in your life, or others’ lives. The question itself is designed to drain creativity from your bones.

6. Fear of disruption.

Getting into creative flow can disrupt your life. Henry Miller referred to this disruption in Sexus with the pregnant term “primal flux.” It’s a hard fact to handle, but the truth is that creativity isn’t all sweetness and light — it’s a volatile, disruptive force that can shatter presumptions, undermine expectations, and dismantle unquestioned standards.  That’s part of what makes it a frightening prospect for our threat-sensitive brains (see #1).

What can we do about that? Decide how much creativity your life can handle — more precisely, how much you are willing to handle.

7. Misunderstanding the “background noise” dimension of creativity. 

For some reason we think that to be creative means constantly creating something tangible, but that’s not how creativity works.  Much of the creative process goes on in the background of your conscious mind space and emerges in conscious flurries.  As discussed in #2, we need chunks of time to create something tangible, but leading up to those chunks of time is an enormous amount of background processing. This is also why #8 that follows is so important.

8. Opportunities slip through the cracks.

You know the old story about how writers keep a notebook by their beds in case they have an idea in the middle of the night?  There’s only two things untrue about that story — it’s not just the night that a notebook or something to scribble on is invaluable to capture rapidly evaporating thoughts.  Those thoughts are creative opportunities, any one of which can open doors to new thoughts, fresh ideas, and untapped creative energy.

Easy fix for this one: get a notebook and a pen, and get ready.

9. It’s easier to get numb.

Irony of ironies, the same incredible organ in our heads that allows us to be creative is also perilously prone to brain-numbing distractions. Sure, those can be chemical distractions–drugs, alcohol, etc–but in this case I mean just the regular old “plug-in drugs” like TV (using the term coined by authorMarie Winn).  The problem with TV, of course, isn’t TV, it’s the hours upon hours that it draws us in. At the very least, at that level it’s a time sink that makes finding those essential chunks of time even harder. At worst, it’s a brain backwater–a complacency refuge from the challenge of creativity.

What to do?  Regulate time. Distractions aren’t the problem; it’s our unregulated devotion to them that doesn’t allow creativity to spark.

10. Limited exposure to the creativity of others. 

I’m a firm believer that creative inspiration isn’t all about originality; it’s more about being driven by the creative achievements of others. After reading a great novel, creative energy swirls in the brain like a newly spawned tornado. After watching an incredible movie, mental wormholes open to challenging ideas and possibilities. Same goes for museums and galleries and concerts and even electronics shows. It doesn’t matter where the ideas originate — it matters where they take you.  To the extent that we limit our exposure to an array of creative ideas (and focus instead on just one source; TV, for example), we limit our creative potential.