Creativity and Innovative Strategies

Creativity and innovation are subtle concepts involving different approaches, yet often share closely related common outcomes. Creativity is the display of fresh and practical ideas while innovation is characterized by implementing those creative ideas within organizational operation. Hence, it can be said that creativity is a pre-requisite for innovation.

Creative performance will occur in an involuntary fashion is, nothing but, irrational thinking. It rather requires motivation, planning and immense efforts. Individuals and organizations shall invest in learning strategies to pursue creative and innovative approaches, not only for their survival but to reach the ultimate success.

Develop Personal Creative Skills: To build personal creative skills, one must first overcome the fear of possible humiliation for sharing his/her idea. Individuals should be proactive by practicing brainstorming and feel free to express their creative thoughts and to take risks.  In addition, proper communication with other team members, asking for resources where necessary, experimenting with new ideas and approaches while considering failures as learning opportunities are other important elements in this perspective.

Enhance Team Performance: Innovation is a long-term approach that requires time. Innovative teams are capable of making prominent impacts if established early and adequately. Team leaders must focus on energizing people for thinking out of the box and on encouraging them to work in collaboration. The principal aspect of enhancing creativity and innovation within a team is to empower employees with trust and to provide them psychological safety where they can share their ideas openly.

Innovation and creativity within an organization: Workplace creativity and innovation can be either enhanced or restricted by its leadership. It has been observed that lack of strategic thinking and innovation affects a business drastically as it fails to compete in the rapidly evolving and challenging market. Therefore, agile leaders always promote creativity, critical thinking and innovation, not only to avoid failure, but also to achieve success by meeting current customer demands. Smart organizations timely pivot according to the market needs and thus succeed in securing a promising future.