One of today’s Tweets from Anthill Magazine featured a short article on creativity and innovation by our acquaintance Roger La Salle, former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC).  Titled Creativity vs Innovation – A fool’s dilemmaRoger begins with ‘To succeed, innovation needs to be more than a nebulous desire to foster creativity in an organisation. It needs to be a concrete business process driven from the top.’

While it is pretty hard to argue with this, and indeed I agree with much of what Roger suggests, I am always concerned when those who champion Innovation (and Roger is a great champion here) so easily dismiss creativity.

Roger says he doesn’t want creativity he wants certainty, and that it is only through stringent management led processes and metrics that innovation can be guaranteed.  Coming as he does from an invention background, this view is understandable, but clearly limited.  There are so many examples where the creative connection of seemingly unrelated thoughts has resulted in outstanding results.  I have personally seen this countless times, and I know that metric dominated processes would not have done anything to create these same outcomes.

Not that I am in favour of ‘floppy’ creativity and silly games, which Roger quite rightly criticises.  While ‘fun’ activities have their place, they in and of themselves very seldom deliver results.  What they may do though is allow a team to connect better, encouraging them to collaborate more creatively.  The individual who is allowed to ‘play’ a little may then feel more ‘enabled’ to suggest crazy ideas that may just lead to something innovative.

So to dismiss these activities as of no use is possibly short-sighted.  My view is that creativity encouraged in a variety of ways can be valuable, but I am more in favour of creative thinking process that is deliberate.

What I do like in Roger’s article is his statement ‘In addition to innovation, a new wave is starting to build, that of opportunity capture and the systematic search for opportunities.’ As Roger says ‘You can teach your people to become opportunists; teach the important things to observe and move your people from being mere operators to opportunists.  There is little doubt the wave of opportunity is gathering momentum.’

I certainly hope he is right, as this is exactly what Mindwerx has been championing for the last 11 years.  The use of Deliberate Creative Thinking to reveal and develop opportunities is the core theme we have been promoting since 1998.  But of course we didn’t start this effort, it has been actively promoted by organisations like CPSI – The Creative Problem Solving Institute for well over 50 years.  What is amazing to me is that there is so much that can be learnt about creativity, but Innovation champions like Roger do no service to organisations by so quickly dismissing it, because it is ‘certainty’ as he says.

In any event this is a good article to read http://bit.ly/6Cmbaj and I like how Roger finishes when he says.  ‘Either way, in these fast moving times, any business that wishes to remain relevant and at the forefront of its specialty needs to embrace change. It needs to constantly re invent itself or stagnation and ultimate extinction will be the inevitable outcome.’

I hope Australian CEOs are listening.