Creativity as a Competitive Resource

Abstract

Organizations today face hyper-competitive, turbulent business environment and an increasingly uncertain future. They have to cope with the both the incessant pressures of the present and the unceasing uncertainties of the future. Creativity is concerned with producing unique ideas, concepts and ways of doing things that would not have occurred normally or evolved routinely.

Creativity is a resource of competitive value but it is underutilized in many organizations. It has come to be recognized as a valuable resource influenced by competitive factors. Faced with difficult and new crisis, recurrently engendered by turbulent business environment, industrial organizations need to evolve creative approaches and responses for coping with rapid technological changes, sudden shifts in markets, severity of trade competition, currency fluctuations and volatile political-economic events. Innovation and development of new products are important forms of such a coping response based on a high degree of creativity.

On the return ultimately increase in the degree of creativity directly and indirectly emphasis the greater positive impact in the organizational effectiveness. Coping responses not only have to be conceived imaginatively and creatively but also have to be coordinated and executed competently. Knowing the role of creativity as the competitive resource of the organization this paper concentrates to analyse the factors determining creativity as a competitive resource by understanding the general characteristics and attributes of creativity and creative individual.

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Keywords: Competitive value, Technological changes, Organizational effectiveness, Innovation and development.

Introduction

Creativity can be expounded in simpler terms of the output of a creative effort. In this sense, creativity may be explained as the unearthing or provision of something that is novel and also useful or relevant, superior or valuable. The outcome of a creative effort must be both significant and markedly different form the existing outcomes. Creativity denotes to mental inclination and capacity of an individual to construct and develop new and superior solutions to problems that are regarded as complex, ambiguous or unclear.

Creative thinking includes the capability to find solutions to problems by changing one’s point of view when normal approaches or conventional channels fail to provide the needed answers. Creative responses or solutions are for the best in business and industry. In broad sense, creativity is concerned not only with generating new creative ideas or insights but also with selling and implementing them once they are developed and have found accepted.

Creativity is not refrained to thinking. Its scope and application extend to all facets of human endeavour from imaginative exploration and conceptualization of difficult problems and issues to working out and testing their solutions and implementing the solutions by securing the willing cooperation of others.

Review of Literature

According to Gilson 2004, Gong et al. 2013, Creativity is viewed as an indispensable source for the organizations to flourish in dynamic environments, acknowledge to unforeseen challenges, and enterprisingly develop new capabilities.

According to Kampylis and Berki (2014, p. 6): ‘Creative thinking is defined as the thinking that influences people to apply their imagination to evolve new ideas, questioning and reasoning, experimenting with alternatives and to assess their own and their collective ideas, in the betterment of final products and processes.

At an individual level, Amabile’s (1997) substantial way of research observes that individual creativity vitally demands expertise (knowledge, skills and abilities of people to make creative inputs to their fields), creative-thinking skills (cognitive styles, cognitive strategies and personality parameters), and congenital task motivation (the willininess to work on some task because it is interesting, involving, challenging and rewarding).

Creative thinking is a tedious process developing from factors, including personality, motivation, circumstance, and divergent and convergent thinking (Meador, 1997).

Creativity is the consideration of knowledge and skillsets in recently identified ways to achieve a determined goal. To acquire such, people must have four key qualities:

• the ability to identify new problems, rather than depending on others to define them
• the ability to transfer knowledge gained in one context to another in order to solve a problem
• a belief in learning as an incremental process, in which repeated attempts will eventually lead to success
• the ability to concentrate the attention in the stalking of a goal, or set of valued goals. (Seltzer & Bentley, 1999, page 10).

Objectives

• To study and understand the general characteristics and attributes of creativity and creative individual.
• To assess the methods that helps in increasing own creativity.
• To analyse the factors determining creativity as a competitive resource.

Characteristics of Creativity

Managing ignorance and failure

Creativity is about managing ignorance. The most important and difficult aspect for human being is to be aware of his ignorance. It is not just possible for even a brilliant individual to be omniscient. It is not sufficient to just acquire knowledge but managing ignorance is also necessary. One’s knowledge in this world is just a drop in the ocean of ignorance.

Managing ignorance require innate intellect and not just experience and faith. Experience and faith can only provide us information but could not convert ignorance into knowledge without the help of innate intellect. Managing failure is similar to managing ignorance because in most of the cases we fail of our ignorance. Never fear failure because it is the manifestation of nature.

Knowledge as a flow concept

Irrelevant knowledge has to be unlearned and new knowledge should be acquired. Existing knowledge may not be relevant unless it is adapted to the new situations in future. Hence, creativity is not only about learning new knowledge but is also about unlearning obsolete knowledge. Unlearning obsolete knowledge is more difficult than acquiring new knowledge.

Being Spiritualistic

Being creative means converting ignorance into knowledge. It also means knowing what you did not know before. In order to become creative, one should know what is not known, what is hidden from us about which we are ignorant. Spiritualism makes a distinction between matter and mind. Energy is the source of matter and consciousness is the source of mind. We can’t find the solutions to problems of this world unless we have explored our own self. In fact, we have to explore and give meaning to our self-consciousness. We may not have control over the outcome but means to solve a problem have to be decided by ourselves.

Repudiation of Law of Causality

Managing creativity is based on the assumption of skepticism and agnosticism. This means that the reality can never be explained perfectly and chance plays a big role in the outcome. The world is not perfectly deterministic. A given cause may not lead to a particular effect and at the most. Only a probable or workable explanation can be given.

Imperfection of nature

Ignorance is not a limitation of human being but an imperfection of nature. Mere fact that world is perfectly deterministic signifies the fact that nature itself is imperfect and complex beyond human comprehension. Nature has made its laws too complicated and also illogical to be understandable by any human being. Laws of nature are very complicated and human mind is not sophisticated enough to understand nature holistically.

Therefore, human beings have divided the knowledge into various subjects and specialization whereby each individual specializes in one small part of a particular subject. As a result, he is ignorant of the rest of the knowledge which is beyond his scope of study.

Holistic Decision- making

Humans gain knowledge through three sources- faith, experience and intellect. For an effective decisions, humans should use faith, experience and innate intellect in a compatible and synergic way. Decision-maker should not concentrate only on rational method of decision-making but should also consider other alternatives like common sense, intuition, heuristics and emotional faculties to take a decision. These skills have to be nurtured by an individual.

Attributes of Creative Individuals

Psychological research has in fact identified and highlighted the distinguishing attributes of creative individuals. These attributes or personality traits may be listed as:

• A strong sense of curiosity
• Openness and independence of thinking and judgement
• The ability to see things in unusual ways
• Accepting and reconciling apparent opposites or paradoxes
• Tolerance of ambiguity
• Keen sensitivity and fostering intuition
• A strong sense of autonomy
• Not bound by group standards and control
• Persistence and motivation
• Highly developed imagination and visualization ability
• The ability to generate a large number of ideas and viewpoints
• Flexibility
• Originality
• The ability to focus and concentrate

The attributes enumerated above are present in all individuals in varying degrees, but in creative persons they are seen to be present in a conspicuous manner and combination.

Steps for Increasing Our Own Creativity

Many researches have evaluated and assessed the various reasons and methodologies that could help to increase our own creativity. Some of the suggested methods are:

Strive for alignment

Make sure that the goals of the organizations you work for are consonant with your most cherished values. Instead of considering jobs at which you excel think instead about jobs that match you deeply embedded life interests.

Pursue some self-initiated activity

Choose projects where your intrinsic motivation is high. If you always loved graphic design, try to determine why the packaging for one of your company’s products leaves customer cold.

Take advantage of unofficial activity

The absence of official status may create a safe haven for nurturing idea until it is strong enough to overcome resistance.

Be open to serendipity

Develop a bias toward action and toward trying new ideas. For instance, if an accident or failure occurs while you’re prototyping a new LCD screen, don’t dismiss it too quickly. Study it for the learning opportunity that may lie within. Each day, write down what surprised you and how you surprised others.

Diversify your stimuli

Intellectual cross- pollination gets you thinking in new directions. Develop cross-functional skills: Rotate into every job you are capable of doing. Get to know people who spark your imagination. Become a lifelong learner that is take classes not related to your work. Bring your insights from outside interests or activities to bear on your workplace challenges.

Create opportunities for informal communication

Take advantage of unanticipated opportunities to exchange ideas with colleagues. Creative thoughts often happens during spontaneous interactions between individuals. Such interactions, however are only useful if real communication occurs. You must find ways to encourage and facilitate communication that is appropriate for the creative environment.

Creativity as a Resource

Creativity is a highly valued resource not only for business and industrial organizations but also for nations and human society as a whole. Scientific discoveries, technological inventions and innovations, engineering achievements and the bases of man’s progress in fields as diverse as agriculture, education, health care, art, music, medicine etc. stem from human creativity. In their absence, modern human society would revert back to a primitive state.

The nature of creativity as a highly valued competitive resource for organizations may be understood along the following dimensions. Cultivation and the use of creativity in and by organizations enables their members to:

1. Discover new opportunities for growth, development and performance improvement.
2. Analyse and solve difficult problems with innovative insights and approaches in a cost effective manner.
3. Generate resources through greater productivity, cost reduction and waste avoidance.
4. Amplify the effectiveness of organization’s strategic positioning and responses.
5. Amplify the effectiveness of organization’s work operations and their coordination in all functional areas.
6. Facilitate and strengthen the realization of cross-functional integration in the management of the organization.
7. Facilitate the planning and implementation of creative methods of management like Total Quality Control and Just-In-Time and enhance their efficacy.
8. Strengthen the effectiveness of organization’s R&D efforts and facilitate the management of technological innovation or product development.
9. Shorten the product development cycles from the stages of concept and inception to market introduction and commercial production.

The above mentioned and similar dimensions of creativity as a valuable competitive resource do not represent its scope or specificity of application. Creativity provides the base or the necessary condition or the amplification factor or the multiplier of organization’s effectiveness and excellence. In the absence of collective strivings of its members, an organization cannot achieve greater productivity and quality, innovation and excellence. It can neither acquire nor sustain a competitive advantage nor ever be in a position to become a marker leader.

Conclusion

Organizations can foster creativity by providing a supportive environment for its sustenance and growth. Most human beings are potentially creative in the areas of their strong interest. Their creative potential can be brought out and amplified through the use of systematic techniques for creative idea generation, in group settings. Groups composed of motivated persons are more effective in generating creative approaches and solutions to ill-defined or poorly structured problems than individuals.

For organizations, creativity is a highly valued competitive resource to the extent that it stands between their competitive global economy and trade. Their ability to cope with the exigencies of a highly complex, volatile and uncertain environment and survive depends on their ability to marshal and mobilize the creative talents of their human resources. The organizations who are unable to do so are doomed to stagnation, decay and demise. So the importance of creativity as a competitive resource lies in the enhancement of the organization’s ability to resolve their complex and difficult problems, existing and emerging effectively.

References

1. Amabile, T.M. (1997) Motivating Creativity in Organizations: On Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do. California Management Review, 40, 39-58. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/41165921.
2. Gilson, L. L., & Shalley, C. E. 2004. A little creativity goes a long way: An examination of teams’ engagement in creative processes. Journal of Management, 30: 453-470.
3. Gong et al. 2013. Core Knowledge Employee Creativity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Riskiness Orientation, Firm Size, and Realized Absorptive Capacity. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12024.
4. Kampylis, P. & Berki, E. (2014). Nurturing creative thinking. International Academy of Education, UNESCO. P.6. Available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002276/227680e.pdf.
5. Koenig, H.G., Meador, K.G. and Parkerson, G. (1997) Religion Index for Psychiatric Research. American Journal of Psychiatry, 154, 885-886.
6. Seltzer, K. & Bentley, T, The creative age: knowledge and skills for the new economy, Demos, London, 1999.