Creativity leads to knowledge and success: 

Despite woeful economic conditions, and the bleak future constantly predicted, the life of business goes on.  In business you rise each morning, and pick-up where you finished the day before; a constant search for new customers, or ways to retain those you have; you try to be more effective to-day than yesterday; and keep costs as low as you can.

If you could have a wish granted it may well be for a solution that is simple, effective, difficult to copy, and different from competitors. The solution may be a product or service finely tuned to the needs of customers, or it may be a process that makes your operations more efficient and effective than competitors.

The life of business is practical and pragmatic, and a genie granting wishes is confined to the land of fairy tales.  If such a solution is to be found we need to find it ourselves. To have a chance we must relearn forgotten skills and knowledge, potentially supercharged by the technology that now lies at our fingertips, and in the “virtual clouds”.  If our generation relearns lost skills, recovers neglected knowledge, and creates greater capabilities through technology it would be one of the better legacies we pass onto future generations.

When the word knowledge appears our minds can jump to the hackneyed and often misinterpreted term knowledge economy.  Thinking beyond the slogan the important questions we need to address are; how can we create knowledge; how can we secure it for our business; and how do we maximise its value?

Knowledge is not a commodity output from some clever machine. People create knowledge through creativity as they interact with the world; trying to understand it, or make something. The skills we need to concentrate on are to do with creativity. The know how to define a need, design and build an original solution that meets the need, and introduce it to the world where people find benefit in its use. We need to go beyond the mantra of the knowledge economy; we need a creative economy of people who produce original things of value, i.e. ideas, systems, products, or services; from this knowledge will flow.

We need leaders who understand the value of creativity, who know how to build a working and learning environment, which develops peoples’ skills and knowledge, and stimulates and supports creativity. The foundation skills we need are to do with how to think and collaborate, supported by information systems that convert information on complex matters into forms that people can comprehend, discuss, explore, and decide on actions.

Some of the knowledge that emerges from creativity can be stored and past between people and generations, but much cannot and resides in people.  It is possible to specify the structure of a bicycle and how it is made, but the knowledge of how to ride it can only be learnt by doing it.  The purpose of a bicycle is transportation, and its purpose is only met when you know how to build and ride it.  Similarly in some dark cupboard we probably have the documents that specify the design for a great ocean liner, but we would struggle to assemble the people with the necessary skills and knowledge to build one.  Knowledge that can be stored has value, but to fully exploit it you need skilful and knowledgeable people.

Business needs people that are creative if it is to deal with the challenges it faces to-day, and in the future.  Although in the future, “it won’t rain every day, there’ll be days we can make hay”, be sure that events will throw up plenty of challenges - problems and opportunities. Problems have a nasty way of getting through the most carefully prepared defences, and opportunities can be fleeting.  Success will depend on the creative capabilities and capacity of a business team to recognise a challenge, and come up with an original solution to tame, or take advantage of it.