 According to a recent survey by Il Sole24Ore, more than two business people out of three consider creativity/innovation and responsibility as core values of business culture.
While the reasons for which innovation should be pursued are clear to everyone (and have much to do with strategic issues like globalization, competitiveness, growth, added value), this centrality of innovation in the view of the business community is somehow comforting.
Just as it is comforting to see the diffusion of the idea that a modern business should play a strong role not merely as an economic motor, but a social one as well, and that it must consequently cultivate an attitude of responsibility regarding the context in which it works.
The same survey, however, brings up an issue that may seem at first secondary, but that could have significant practical consequences: creativity and innovation, according to the survey and most likely according to the interviewees, come as a pair. As if they were two sides of the same coin, or perhaps even two synonyms.
The premise that, in order to innovate – that is, to develop a new idea and translate it into an innovative product or process – one must first have the idea is so obvious as to not require stating.
But what is perhaps not adequately considered is the fact that not all new ideas are valid or appropriate. For an idea to be new, all one has to do is break an existing rule, any rule. Shoe polish and onion pizza, for example, is a new idea.
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
For an idea to be considered creative, it cannot stop at merely breaking an existing rule, but must originate a new and better rule. Creativity, as the word suggests, creates new rules. And not only do they have to be new, they have to actually function. It’s hard work, full of unknowns.
Creativity is not just the preliminary phase of innovation. It is something unto itself.
On the other hand, creativity and innovation are not just two different and important moments that follow one upon the other in the development process, but they belong to two different levels of logic.
Innovation is a social and economic phenomenon. It involves a group, or groups. It requires investments, infrastructures and policies. It demands the courage to take risks. It has a strong planning component, and is the fruit of a specific business strategy.
Creativity is mental and individual phenomenon. It involves individuals, or groups of individuals in cooperation. It requires flexibility, skills, talent, focus and extraordinary determination. It is in many ways uncontrollable, relying often on chance. It can be encouraged but it cannot be planned.
The culture, experience and training of a good business people enable them to understand the logic of innovation and to govern it through the management of time and money. The culture, experience and training of creative people are less controllable, and this can be very annoying. Not to mention the fact that groups of creative people can be truly difficult and complicated to manage and orient toward a final objective without getting lost in separate threads of original thought.
The tendency, therefore, is to resolve the problem by incorporating creative development in quite arbitrary ways into the processes of innovation, equally complex but more manageable. Which leads people to assume that all you need for creative development are policies, investments, infrastructures, tax breaks or public financing. And to believe that the creative process can be planned and scheduled. And lastly, that creative workers can be considered, in terms of both incentivizing and controlling them, like any other employee.
COMFORT AND CHALLENGE
It doesn’t exactly work that way, and this becomes clear when looking at companies that consider creativity as the true strategic key for development. These companies, from Italy’s Diesel to America’s Google, seem to have several distinctive traits in common: an informal, pleasant and relaxed work environment that is also highly challenging for individuals; incentive systems not based exclusively on monetary reward; superiors who give their time and lend an ear to employees with good ideas.
Creative people don’t need to be pushed to work. If anything, they usually tend to be perfectionists who work too much, sometimes unreasonably so. Far more important to them than monetary incentive is having respect, reputation and opportunity, and feeling that they belong to an organization that itself has an excellent reputation. They cannot be made to feel trapped by rigid procedures and schemes of thought, nor for that matter by standard office hours (Nota bene: libraries and laboratories that close at 6 pm or during the weekends do not help foster creativity), but they do require that objectives and quality standards are very clear. They often have a strong social conscience, and are thus gratified in knowing that their work and their dedication, whatever field they may work in, might somehow change the world for the better.
REWARD MERIT CONSISTENTLY AND CONTINUALLY
Another fact that tends to elude us is this: creativity is not something that already exists, that need only be procured and transformed into innovation by some industrial process or other, as if it were a raw material like gold, iron or petroleum.
The failure to perceive this important difference probably derives from a series of misunderstandings.
The first concerns the view of the fixity of the individual: “people are what they are”. All you have to do is take the ones with the best ideas and put them to work. Simple as that.
But people aren’t what they are.
Instead, they are what they’ve become, attending to greater or lesser benefit schools of greater or lesser quality and frequenting more or less stimulating circles. If a society fails to “produce” creative individuals through an educational system that rewards merit and recognizes excellence, then its businesses will have a very difficult time competing and producing innovation.
The possibility of relying on a large number of creative talents, on whom the capacity for innovation over the medium to long term depends, is intrinsically connected to a high level of literacy, universal quality education and a large number of centers of excellence. And, it must be said, to a high level of employment among women.
The second misunderstanding is of a methodological nature. If we think of development as process that unfolds over time, we see that new ideas generate innovative processes, and that innovative processes (those, for example, that make new technologies or new materials available) generate yet more new ideas. This is one of the many aspects which, according to Gregory Bateson’s definition, are presented in terms of coevolution, whereby phenomenon A fosters the occurence of phenomenon B, which in turn augments the probability that phenomenon A is repeated. In short, it would seem that once such a cycle is begun (which isn’t easy), then innovation becomes miraculously capable of generating and perpetuating itself.
Unfortunately that’s not entirely true.
The sinister detail one might overlook is this: the entire model is premised on the assumption that there is a continual influx of new individuals capable of generating new ideas. New individuals who are sharper, better trained, more talented, able to produce ever better ideas within a system whose complexity grows at a pace and in ways that are difficult to even imagine.
Producing well-trained and talented individuals is the critical issue. The investments needed to do so run from long- to extremely long-term. And most of the variables involved elude the sphere of the direct influence of businesses. But that’s no reason not to address the topic.
As Benedetto Vertecchi points out, an engineer or doctor or manager graduating from university today has at least 35 years of work in front of them. And well before retiring, they’ll discover that much of what they studied in school has been rendered obsolete. If they don’t possess the tools necessary for keeping themselves continually up to date, they will not only be unable to contribute to the innovation process, but they’ll probably end up impeding it, whether intentionally or not. A 2006 study conducted by the Province of Milan reveals that business leaders often find that the greatest obstacles to innovation lie in the conservative mentality of their own employees.
Today, compared with the OECD countries surveyed by PISA, which measures the skills of 15-year-olds, Italian schools come out rather poorly, always toward the bottom of the list in science, math and reading comprehension.
The fact that certain students and certain educational institutions are truly excellent offers, paradoxically, little encouragement, for it tells us that once the cream is skimmed from the top, the vast majority is decidedly sub-par.
It is important that business and industry lobby not only for innovation strategies and policies, but also for programs, structures and investments that would ensure a quality basic education to everyone, not to mention specialized education, lifelong training, and the cultivation of the special talent one needs in order to learn how to learn.
But that’s still not enough. From the standpoint of the creative process – and this is another point that business people tend to ignore – the processes that generate the idea for a new product, a new drug, a new service, a new novel and a new song are very similar.
They are born in the mind of an individual or group by reason of a number of causes and a set of conditions, some of which are so ephemeral and transient that it is difficult to plug them into an industrial development plan. They are born in unexpected ways, perhaps in a garage, perhaps as a consequence of a chance event.
New and fertile ideas are born and then they spark a wondrous sequence of interrelations that are equally fertile. The fact that creativity is widespread in the social context, and that new works of art, new novels, new films are constantly being produced, circulating new and vital visions of the world, is very interesting to business people is not as strange as it may seem.
An idea that works, regardless of context, is a seed that has the capacity to sprout, and in doing so to create an environment conducive to the spreading of other seeds which will in turn sprout and spread yet others. Sure, one needs good soil and a plow – that is, investments, laboratories, infrastructures. But without a significant quantity of good seeds, planted and cultivated properly, there is nothing to harvest. And, in the end, nothing worthwhile is produced.
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