Getting down to the business of creativity

The Venture Development Center team consumes vast quantities of research results that bear on how large unwieldy organizations manage to think and work in new ways to achieve superior performance.

Here are some interesting snippets from Getting Down to the Business of Creativity published on May 14, 2008 by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Three faculty members discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport.

"The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it's in the arts, sciences, or business.”

Research demonstrates the causal relationship between emotion and creativity, “with positive emotion tied to higher creativity and negative feelings linked to lower motivation and creativity.”

So what can managers do to promote a healthy, positive work life among employees? A pat on the back is always welcome. But research shows that “people have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.”

(This reminds me of one comment universally endorsed that appears in the report of the Research and Graduate Studies Committee during UMass Boston's strategic planning process about reengineering internal business processes to be a tailwind versus a headwind.)

“Maximum diversity in cultures, disciplines, and backgrounds—the intersection where creativity is most likely to occur.”

"In business, people can go only so far by doing things the way they have always been done. In entrepreneurship especially, it is essential to perceive opportunities that others have not, and to pursue them in novel yet appropriate ways at every stage of the game. Such creative solutions will be necessary for managers to help solve the socioeconomic challenges of the future."

"As a manager, you need to create a culture that will convince people to kick off the filters they're used to applying and to think more broadly. It is the shift in the mindset of employees that can prove most difficult."