Creativity, People, and Technology

It is commonly understood by each of us, that the value we deliver to our customers is that of 'Creativity'. However, Creativity means different things to different people. It is important for us to realize the critical attributes of creativity, and how we can manage ourselves in being more creative. This will ensure we constantly and consistently deliver more value to our customers. The role that technology plays is also important for us to leverage, as IT is the medium that lets us express our creativity to deliver value to our customers.

What is Creativity?

After decades of research, Creativity has been defined by researchers - Prof Margaret Boden, and Mihaly Cziksenmihaly¹, to name a couple - as evident in anything that is 'new', 'surprising', and 'valuable'. This qualification of creativity highlights that while most of us commonly understand the first two as components of creativity, the third is the component most often missing in our design objectives. Creativity is always qualified by the RECIPIENTS of creative output, and NOT by the creators! It is not enough to create something that is new and surprising and original, it also needs to be 'valuable' for the recipients, our audience. Creativity delivers vallue to the recipient, and needs to be new and surprising for the recipients to become receptive.

What causes Creativity?

Lets look at what causes people (us) to be creative. We are creative when we put together our knowledge, principles, facts, skills, concepts, and ideas to generate a product or service that delivers value to our customer. In the business scenario, this value comes mainly in the form of solutions to problems that are being faced by the customer. This is probably the output and resources we use when we create, but lets also think about where the energy comes from. If we think of the motivation we have to solve our customer's problem., the motivation seems to be our desire, ambition, personal need to be useful, to others' benefit, This can be commonly understood by the 'care' we have for other people in solving problems they are facing. So it naturally leads to the conclusion is that our creativity is caused by the feeling of 'care' we build i ourselves for our customers and the 'problem'/'opportunities' they are facing.

How to cause Creativity?

Of course, we would not be able to create just because we wanted to. We also need the ability to create, and a medium to express it in. The ability to create is built by our ability to manage our minds, which come up with solutions to problems. We need to have sufficient levels of knowledge, experience, and thinking abilities to be able to be consistently creative. And so that we stay ahead of 'competition', even by our customer audiences, we need to constantly keep increasing our levels of knowledge, experiences, and ability to think better. (THINK= Trying to Heuristically Invent New Knowledge). A very useful domain to study and practice for this is 'Critical Thinking'².

This is IT!

As I mentioned before, we also need a medium to be creative in. The medium is what takes what we create to our customers/users so that they truly can benefit from the value it has to offer to them. IT is a common medium now, fast spreading because of wider availability (Internet, Computers, Devices, Interoperability) of technology, and far lower costs of ownership. Of course, in some case we might debate that technologically communicated creations do not compare well with the original (say) paper based creation, etc. But this argument does not apply to most creations and except for some connoisseurs, people who can't, or don't have the need to appreciate the fine points of the creation, don't have the time to even worry about it.

To sum it up…

It is important, therefore, for us to apply all we know to come up with creations that are valuable for our customers, using the technology that they can use as the medium for our creation. What we produce will then be truly creative. And to continuously increase the value we deliver, we must focus on constantly growing what we know, on developing innovations in the expression through technology, and on caring for what is truly going to be valuable for our customers.

Lets join the Care, Create, Express… J

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