Creativity

CREATIVITY

Introduction

Creativity is an ability to come out with new ideas and different viewpoints on a subject. It involves the process of breaking down and restructuring our knowledge about the subject in order to gain new insight into its nature. Creativity is a large and complex topic. Thus in the text below, we only considered from an organizations managerial perspective, with the cases revolving around what the manager must do to manage creativity effectively. Creativity is topic relevant not only to the entrepreneurial start-up just like others people think as usual when applying in business but it is to whole organizations in general. It’s become an important source of competitive strength for all organizations concerned with growth and change. Thus, for an organization to be responsive to change is to be creative: in such terms as perceiving the environment; developing new product; and services; establishing new business procedures.

Creativity may be an integral part of organization culture that management wished to instill instead to maintain or grown the organization working strength. In other-hand, it may also determine organizational structure and human resource practices working on. Therefore, creativity presents a variety of management challenges and it may require significant tangible investment.

In the text below, three major issues are addressed: first a working definition of creativity useful in business term is established; second, the importance of managing creativity is demonstrated in term of nurturing the competitive strength of a given organization; and third, a set of tools is presented for managers to influence the creative process. These tools reflect the importance of understanding creativity in both individual and organizational terms. By stated differently the sub-topic of creativity, the following sections are entitled and will be discuss by the following text.

1. What is Creativity?

2. Why Creativity is important in an organization?

3. How to apply Creativity into an organization?

What is Creativity?

Creativity is a concept which we always come across in our daily conversation. We hear of creative people, admire creative objects of art or read creative books. Yet despite our almost innate understanding of what it means to be creative there is much confusion about the nature of creativity. However, any definition of creativity is complicated because the concept has many dimensions.

Wertheimer as in Tony Proctor (1999) book writing, give the solution that “creative thinking involved breaking down and restructuring our knowledge about something in order to gain new insights into its nature.” Understanding our own cognitive model of reality may therefore be an important determinant of our ability to think creative. This solution both supported by Kelly and Roger in Tony Proctor (1999) books also, they makes argument by maintaining that we can be creative by gaining an understanding of how we think about a subject. They stated-“Creativity is something which occurs when we are able to organize our thoughts in such a way that readily leads to a different and even better understanding of the subject or situation which we are considering.”

According Torrance in Tony Proctor (1999), he defined creative as:

The process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies; testing and retesting them; and finally communicating the results”.

How then do we make these definitions, or any other for the creativity, come alive in a shared way in our organizations? Most people within organizations will tell you how much they value creativity. However, as we discussed earlier, creativity in organizations is often suppressed much more often than it is supported. This isn’t because managers have a vendetta against creativity. Everyday creativity is undermined unintentionally in work environments that were established вЂ" for entirely good reasons вЂ" to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and systems control. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of maintaining the status quo is muted creativity. Only when we focus on how to foster and nurture creativity in others, our organizations, and ourselves will innovation occur.

In addition, Peter Cook (1998) defined:

“Creativity is something which many people believe is a vital ingredient in achieving excellence in a wide variety of fields, yet creativity is a вЂ?loose’ concept which is difficult to represent by words alone. To complicate the matter further, the definition of creativity varies вЂ" depending on the context in which it is used вЂ" for example, in painting, writing, crafts and business. Among the organizations in which I have been fortunate to work creativity has been associated with inspiration вЂ" something which is a gift вЂ" and a series of techniques and methods. It has also received a вЂ?bad press’ through a number of more negative associations, such as witchcraft and mental illness. This is not surprising when one considers the connections that some people make between magic and creativity.”

These definitions shows seem to agree that creativity involves an in-depth thought of a subject and an ability to come out with new and different viewpoints. However, we are gets that any definition of creativity is complicated because the concept is multi-faceted.

At the end of the creativity describe we gets notice that creativity comes with a price. The costs within a competitive industry of maintaining a creative atmosphere and of retaining key personnel can be high in cost. Now-days, top managers in organization are increasingly aware of the extent to which “climate” and “corporate culture” can translate into expensive, tangible investment. Yet, the costs of failing to foster creativity can be significantly higher. Well-positioned indeed is the organization that facilitates the progress of its creative members toward the next biotechnology breakthrough, the next Pac Man video game, the next Macintosh computer, the next “Star Wars”