Organisational success: can’t live without creativity

Do you know what the ultimate competitive advantage in today’s fast changing business climate is? The answer is: organisational creativity. Business is fundamentally a creation process: creation of customer value, creation of new technologies and processes, creation of new market space, and creation of the better ways of creation itself.  It is therefore safe to say that a world class organisation must exhibit an unequalled excellence in creation in order to be recognised.

Organisations need to develop from within

Harnessing organisational creativity is rapidly becoming the most important ingredient in achieving business excellence in almost all aspects of business. It is a capability that organisations can develop from within. Harnessing creativity to gain competitive advantage is not a matter of waiting for inspiration to descend from the sky, but a deliberate process and capability that is institutionalised in the organisation and can be called upon when deeded. This institutionalised process and the resultant performances in making use of creativity are often referred to as innovation or organisational innovation.

To develop the capability of organisational innovation, there are four key principles to follow:

• People focused: Create a highly engaging environment where every employee can participate and contribute his / her talent and realise his / her true potential.

• Taking challenges: Always look for ways to improve; and ask the question can we do it better. If better is possible, good is never enough.

• Being passionate: Having a burning desire and passion is the unlimited source of energy and wisdom.

• Action orientated: To innovate, 5% of it is to figure out what to do, and 95% is doing it. Setting up teams to act upon the ideas and test the ideas is pivotal to success. If you run out the ways that don’t work you bound to have the ways that do work.

There are four key areas where the actions and process can begin to take place immediately:

• Product innovation: Striving for regular new product introduction, and make your own product obsolete before the competitors do.

• Service innovation: be attentive to customer’s service needs and go the extra miles to delight the customer by introducing new ways and new features of services.

• Process innovation: Processed must be reviewed for its fitness to purpose regularly; ‘it has been like this for years’ should not be the reason to keep it; applying process mapping tools will always shed lights on the hidden waste.

• Strategy innovation: Dramatically accelerate the pace of strategic renewal; developing a diverse “blue ocean” portfolio of strategic options.

However, there is no universal solution for organisations to improve their ability to generate, develop, and disseminate new ideas. World class organisations face and deal with different challenges in their own unique innovative ways. It is worth noting that the scope of innovation often has to be taken from one extremity to the other. That means the truly world class innovation process must integrate the components from internal, cross units, and through to the external supply chain.

If you want to know what else it takes to become a world class organisation, read “In pursuit of World Class Excellence” by Dr. Dawei Lu.