Creativity in business is about creating new meanings for consumers. How does it work?
Creative thinking is an integral part of successful entrepreneurship. The ability to find new meanings and create additional value for consumers can become a significant competitive advantage, bringing a company to the forefront of the market. Jaroslav Kaplan, an entrepreneur, expert in the field of improving business efficiency, founder of the Business IQ project, and president of the Kaplan Research Company, discusses whether it can be learned and how to use it.
Content:
What is "ability?”
Is there really anything you can do about it?
What entrepreneurial and creative thinking have in common?
Where does one get ideas, or which observational perspective to choose?
In the business community, few people yet recognize and understand such a phenomenon as "entrepreneurial aptitude", which manifests itself in the skill of seeing opportunities where others see only limitations, and can be crucial in running a business. Entrepreneurs use unconventional approaches, apply innovative ideas, experiment with new concepts, thus realizing the creative potential in their activities. They strive to create products and services that not only satisfy market needs, but also bring new emotions, impressions and experiences. So it makes sense to look at this phenomenon from completely new perspectives in search of non-trivial solutions.
What is "ability?” To understand this, let's compare two children. The first one just sat down at the piano, immediately began to match sound to sound, and after a few lessons he can play a simple melody freely. The second one has been practicing for several years and can hardly distinguish one sound from another, let alone play anything. Obviously, in this example, the first child seems more capable than the second. The same applies to entrepreneurship. One person starts business after business and they all succeed, while another person can't succeed and continually abandons their endeavors. And here everything seems clear in terms of ability. Let's dig deeper and understand why this happens.
The first impression is that the less successful entrepreneur is doing something wrong, while his more successful colleague is doing things right. This hypothesis sounds logical, but in practice it is different. For the sake of experiment let's look at two people who are given the same training, the same tools, etc. As a result, we will see that one of them is able to learn, grasp the essence, understand the subject and act significantly better than the other.
Therefore, the personality of the one who does, his Intellect, awareness, ability, is not less important than what he does. That is, focusing solely on actions, as well as trying to correct them, will only succeed in a small number of cases. Because the real reason for failure lies in who is doing the actions. There’s no point trying to change what entrepreneurs do without changing their mindset. It's like giving a liver transplant to an alcoholic without changing his lifestyle. Our thoughts and perspective on any problem determine the quality of our decisions and life in general.
Is there really anything that can be done about it? Imagine a friend who has been studying a foreign language for twenty years, but can't string two words together in it. He regularly changes teachers, methods, programs, but the result is the same - inability to communicate. What is the reason for this? Bad teachers, programs and teaching methods? Maybe so, but over the years thousands of other people who have been taught by the same programs and teachers have spoken the language better than its native speakers. So, obviously, we are dealing with another problem, or to put it more precisely, with the owner of the problem - the person himself.
We can assume that he is actually unwilling and unprepared to use his mind, body, intention and perseverance to learn the language. In this case, it is impossible to teach him anything, because the abilities - Intellect and awareness - are directly related to how much a person is willing and ready to do and experience something. Teachers, methods and training programs are secondary.
The same goes for entrepreneurship. A person may or may not have the desire to do something and use his resources efficiently. And the success of a business is entirely determined by who manages it. The personality of the entrepreneur, his worldview has the most direct relation to what he will do and how he will use the resources available to him, and what results he will get in the end. This is the very path that will lead us to the concept of "creativity" in entrepreneurship and, looking ahead, even allow us to give a new definition of entrepreneurial activity: "Entrepreneurship is a form of creativity".
What entrepreneurial and creative thinking have in common Every true entrepreneur, like an artist, is constantly in search of new ideas, thoughts and meanings. At the heart of his activity is the creation of something unique that did not exist before. He can look at any old problem from a new angle and solve it in a non-trivial way. It is these abilities that put entrepreneurs on par with prominent artists. And just as an artist does not need the consent of someone else to use the power of his imagination, so an entrepreneur can find ideas for business in any, even the most seemingly inappropriate situation.
The American biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who first isolated vitamin C, believed that "to explore is to see what everyone else has seen and to think what no one else has thought". This approach can be a very non-trivial competitive advantage and a good start for any success story.
Also, in entrepreneurship, just as in art, it is impossible to appreciate the work in isolation from the author. A writer captivates the reader with text, a musician calls on chords and sounds, and an entrepreneur has his own "palette" with which he creates in the consumer a special perception of his products and services. Each has their own unique tools, capabilities and ideas. Beethoven would not be Beethoven if he only repeated what Haydn and Mozart did. With each truly creative project, the entrepreneur draws a boundary between himself and everything that has gone before, and inscribes himself into history. This is the level of an artist - having power over your own imagination and the ability to create new things, which is essentially the same thing.
Where to get ideas, or which observational perspective to choose Take, for example, a person in pain. The knowledge on how to deal with it may belong to different "knowledge categories", such as: surgery, sports, massage, nutrition, cardiology, physiotherapy, etc. Also in entrepreneurship, a customer's problem can be solved not "in general", but in one of many possible ways, i.e. using a "category of knowledge", which will then set the whole context of the entrepreneur's communication with customers, forming a "category of meaning" for interaction with the brand.
In the pain example, the entrepreneur will have to choose one of the "categories of meaning" as his "solution": cardiology, nutrition, physiotherapy, surgery, massage, etc. However, the most promising will be the decision to create a new, proprietary niche, such as "treating body pain with aromatherapy", if one does not already exist. This will give the entrepreneur a lot of additional opportunities. But the most interesting thing here is that the category he chooses will then completely define his context of interaction with consumers. Surgeons will work with one type of customer in one way, physiotherapists with a second type of customer in another way, nutritionists with a third type of customer in another way, fitness trainers with a fourth type of customer, and so on.
Each of these specialists will have their own context for perceiving the data and their own evaluation criteria. This is a matter of principle. It will be "reflected" in decision-making, recognizing opportunities and using resources based on the rules of the category. The body is not a simple collection of organs "in themselves" isolated from each other. It is a system of some sort. Now the whole issue is that each specialist "sees" the body as its "own" system: a surgeon, an aromatherapist, and a fitness trainer all see different systems in the body. Accordingly, they all see different body functions, structures, limits of using the body's capabilities, different processes and elements of this system. And as a result, it turns out that the body is one and the same, but there are an infinite number of perspectives on it and what it is. Let's add a religious mystic to the mix, and he will tell us a whole new story about what the body really is. Medical professionals would likely be surprised at his point of view.
We can't decide who is right and who is wrong. Our goal is to see that there can be multiple points of view or perspectives of observation on the same object, and that is the basis of creativity, and all the opportunities of an entrepreneur lie in this area.