Key takeaways:
- 90% of high-growth brands agree that fostering creative ideas is essential to business success.
- 48% of high-growth companies strongly agree that promoting creative collaboration is a key factor for success.
- Encouraging cross-department communication, allowing for experimentation and maintaining an open mind are critical to building a culture of creativity.
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Creativity is the beating heart of innovation, and the root of problem solving. Behind every innovative idea is a pain point – a problem – that prompts a creative solution.
One of my daughter’s favorite books is “How to Solve a Problem” by Ashima Shiraishi, one of the world’s youngest and most skilled climbers. She tells the story of how she learned to solve a problem (climbing a boulder in this case) by imagining each challenging section as a familiar object and mapping her way to the top. She uses every fall as “a message, a hint, an idea. A new way to move from over there to over here.”
It’s this same type of thinking that drives innovation and growth in business. According to Deloitte’s 2023 Global Marketing Trends report, 50% of high-growth brands strongly agree that fostering creative ideas is essential to business success – and when including “agree” responses, that number reaches nearly 90%.
So, if creativity drives growth, how do you drive creativity? How do you foster inspiration and fresh ideas to move your project or business forward?
The Outside World
Recently, we polled our LinkedIn audience asking, “how do you find creative inspiration?” 52% said they find inspiration in nature, travel or inspiring places. I find this to be true for myself as well. I often take a walk through the neighborhood park when I need to think through a problem. On a work trip to NYC last year I spent a morning wandering MoMA, absorbing the creativity of the greats and finding inspiration in everything from the giant blue paper cutouts of Matisse to the typography in a poster by Alfred Roller and the “Little Ghost Eating Bread” by Meret Oppenheim.
Your Environment
A break in your routine or even just sitting in a different area can prompt a new train of thought. Additionally, your work environment – the attitudes, policies and challenges of your workplace – can have a significant impact on creativity. In an article from Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, PhD, writes about her research into the influence of work environments on creativity. In a study conducted at a large tech company, her team found that creativity-promoting work environments were “more intellectually challenging and offered sufficient resources, greater degrees of freedom, and much encouragement of innovative thinking.”
Collaboration
In the same Deloitte report mentioned previously, 48% of high-growth companies strongly agreed that promoting creative collaboration was essential to long term business success. Encouraging cross-department communication, allowing for experimentation and maintaining an open mind are all critical factors in creating a culture of collaboration and creativity. In tandem with internal collaboration, looking to external sources (like partners, suppliers and customers) can uncover an abundance of creative ideas.
Take Integreon for example – our creative teams spend every day working with our clients to inspire creativity through design, research and operations, which in turn gives our clients the freedom to focus on core business activities without sacrificing creative innovation.
Where do you find creative inspiration?
What methods do you employ to do great things?
Learn more about how we support financial firms with presentation and creative production.
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