"The proof of an innovation is not its novelty, nor its scientific content, nor the ingenuity of the idea… it is its success in the market" Peter Drucker.
introduction
The purpose of this work is to prepare an essay on creativity and innovation of the management management process in organizations, considering bibliographic resources and various Internet sites.
In the book of Genesis of the Holy Scriptures, he establishes the creation of man as a being like GOD.
Book of Genesis 1: 26-27 indicates:
Then God said: Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens, over the beasts, over all the earth, and over every animal that crawls on the earth. And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female he created them. (Ver. RV1960)
As it appears from the biblical account, one of the attributes of GOD is that he is a creative and innovative being, so by nature the human being has been created with the attribute of being creative and innovative, since he was made in the image and according in the likeness of GOD.
There is no being on earth, different from the human being, who has such attributes of being creative and innovative. An ape can be given a piece of wood, and the ape can use the piece of wood to lower a fruit from a tree, but is unable to transform that wood into another instrument. Not so the human being, who can transform that wood into infinite tools with multiple uses. For example, the piece of wood can transform it into a spear, a bow and arrow, a fishing rod, a lever to move heavier objects, etc.
The creativity and innovation of the human being has been a process that in some cases has arisen from spontaneity; in others, learning from mistakes; in other cases, driven by circumstances and necessity. The truth is that creativity and innovation are elements that have marked the life of the human in all its aspects, from individuality to the community, reaching organizations as social structures created to achieve goals, through human talent.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, human beings have not exploited their full potential in the field of creativity and innovation, so disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and management have emerged, among others, interested in studying creative thinking. Thus, research emerges such as that of the psychologist Howard Gardner (1995) who indicates that a person is not creative in general, but expresses his creativity in a particular area, whether in writing, teaching, or in the direction of an organization, etc.
The purpose of this work is to deal with creativity and innovation focused on the management management process in organizations.
II. Creativity
Creative thinking
Any ability or faculty to think is called thinking, according to the Espasa-Calpe dictionary (2005). It can also be said that everything that is brought into existence through the activity of the intellect is called thought. On the other hand, creativity is the power to create, and that involves introducing or establishing something for the first time.
Therefore, creative thinking consists in the development of new ideas and concepts, through the ability to invent new combinations of ideas to satisfy a need in an original way.
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, indicates that creative thought can be understood as the acquisition of knowledge in a particular way of cognitive approach, which presents original, flexible characteristics, with plasticity and fluidity, which works as a cognitive tool in the formulation, construction and problem solving in a context of learning and appropriation of knowledge.
From the above, creativity is made up of:
- The production of a new way of thinking. In order to solve a problem. The idea must be developed 100% of its totality. The anticipation of the consequences arising from the new idea.
According to Gardner (Op. Cit.), The creative person has creative thoughts regularly and it is not about fleeting ideas that emerge occasionally. And according to Lefcovich (2005), originality as a component of creativity is not enough, but the new idea must be appropriate, useful and viable. In the case of business organizations, it must influence the way of doing business, such as improving a product, or establishing new ways of carrying out a process, or generating new ideas in strategic thinking.
Creativity in management
According to Crissien (2005), the manager has evolved through the markets, by the approach, and the business orientation, and the way in which one competes for a market segment has also evolved.
In consideration of the approach, the best manager is one who has the modern approach required by the company of these times with a systemic vision, where all the actors involved in the business process combine to generate value, taking into account all the stake holders, suppliers, company as a transforming entity of resources in goods and services for the satisfaction of final customers and society in general. Given the competitiveness factor to which the modern company is subjected and to the changes resulting from endogenous and exogenous factors to the organization, it is not enough to just have a systemic approach, but that the modern manager must add the ability to think creatively, have expertise and motivation, to add value to your management.
As for business orientation, the modern manager is oriented to be a comprehensive manager, where he must consider not only the product and sales, but the fight is for the largest market share, and for this he must achieve customer loyalty, In addition to being an excellent communicator and constant researcher of the behavior of trends and tastes of the society where your product is directed. Here, the manager's creativity must flow to propose increasingly personalized marketing strategies, products that are tailored to the client, facilitate sales conditions for his clients, and for all this he must make use of technology to optimize his results.
In reference to the markets, the modern manager must apply strategies with a vision from the client, since the client of today is the one in charge, and that thanks to technology the markets become increasingly individualized, thinking of a relationship of long term, so the manager of the third millennium must fully expose his creativity. In the case of horizontal marketing, your products and services must be broad enough to meet the needs of multiple industries, the marketing efforts that support them must reach this spectrum of buyers and potential buyers. For vertical marketing, products and services must be targeted to specific user groups and their individual needs,vertical markets are characterized by being environments with a large amount of documents or data, in which the particular needs of different groups of users are addressed, for example, students, teachers and the administration of the school or university in the sector of education, banks and financial institutions, as well as their clients in the financial sector.
With the advent of information and communication technologies (ICT), new forms of interrelation of the company with internal and external actors have emerged, such as e-learning, e-commerce, e-community, e-working, e-business, and e-goverment, among others. The emergence of new conceptual categories, also agree on new necessary competencies that the manager of the third millennium must have, so new creative managerial proposals must emerge in harmony with said scenarios.
According to Rojas (2007), the study of creativity begins at the beginning of the 20th century, entities interested in the analysis of the creative process in the company appear, for 1980 the book Synetics by William J. Gordon appears, then the Cambridge synectics group who was the first to offer data and hypotheses for the study of creativity.
Rojas (Op cit) expresses:
The word synectic is of Greek origin and means the union of distinct and apparently irrelevant elements. The theory is applied to the integration of individuals to a group, to the exposition and solution of problems. It is an operational theory aimed at making people aware of the preconscious psychological processes underlying creative activity. The synetics process includes: making the strange known and making the known strange; He identifies four mechanisms to make what is known strange, all of a metaphorical nature: personal analogy, direct analogy, symbolic analogy, fantastic analogy.
Synectic theory holds:
- That the effectiveness of people can be increased if they are made to understand the processes that start when they are creating. In the creative process, the emotional component is more important than the intellectual one; the irrational more important than the rational; the emotional and irrational elements are the ones that must be understood to increase the chances of success in solving problems.
The business environment and creativity
For Majaro (1994), cited in Rojas, 2007, he affirms that people grow fully in a creative environment. Individual creativity, he says, is never extinguished, but when the organizational climate is adverse, the subject alienates or uses his creativity against the company or leaves work to join another organization that allows him to develop his creativity.
Amabile (1988), cited in Rojas, 2007, indicates that the variables that facilitate creativity are:
(d) Freedom and control of work.
(e) Good direction that sets goals, avoids distractions, and is not too strict.
(f) Sufficient resources.
(g) Stimulation of new ideas.
(h) Collaboration between divisions of labor.
(i) Recognition of creative work.
(j) Have enough time to think.
(k) The existence of challenging problems.
(l) Sense of urgency that the work be done.
While the factors that limit creativity are:
(a) Poor rewards.
(b) Poor communication.
(c) Bureaucratic formalities.
(d) Lack of freedom.
(e) Apathy.
(f) Unrealistic and inadequate evaluation.
(g) Insufficient resources.
(h) Pressure due to lack of time.
(i) Lack of will to assume the risk of change.
(j) The defensive nature of the organization and
(k) Competitiveness.
Creativity, according to Majaro (1994), can be classified into normative, exploratory, and creativity by chance.
Creativity is normative when ideas are generated with the deliberate purpose of analyzing and solving specific needs. It is the most efficient in terms of cost-benefits.
Exploratory creativity focuses on extrapolating into the future from current knowledge and technologies. The synthesis of these two types of creativity offers the perfect combination to guide actions towards specific but lavish goals in imaginative solutions.
Creativity by chance is what is known as serendipity, it occurs when the ideas that generate innovation accidentally arise.
Majaro (1994) distinguishes creativity and innovation. Creativity is the thought process that helps us generate ideas. Innovation is the practical application of these ideas, which are implemented in order to better execute a certain activity.
Boosting creativity
For Guinart (2013), creativity can be enhanced through the following keys:
The experience:
One of the bases of creativity is experience. For a team to be creative, it has to be an expert in that sector. Thus, to be creative in a subject and make a difference, you must first understand its rules and how it works.
Curiosity:
Creative organizations try to go further and break pre-established norms. Curiosity is essential to explore new topics and ways of doing things.
Motivation:
Creativity is closely linked to motivation. To be creative, a company must have a motivated team and work in a flexible way, without pressure. The work environment should help enhance creative thinking.
Simplicity:
Creativity is increasingly associated with simple lines. The law of simplicity allows you to discover something in all its splendor, highlighting the most relevant.
Emotion:
Creativity must have the capacity to move. The emotion must be present from the creative impulse to the final work. A company will never stand out for its creativity if it is not capable of creating a differentiating product that manages to connect with people and awaken their emotion.
Lateral thinking:
Lateral thinking is to leave behind the pieces that already exist and seek to change them. One of the techniques of lateral thinking is provocation. When we break with the pre-established movement we begin to give way to the creative approach.
Take the risk:
To do new things you have to do things differently and take risks. As Einstein said, "If you are looking for different results, don't always do the same thing."
Surprise:
Creativity has the power to surprise. Companies looking to create a product or creative process must include large doses of ingenuity and surprise, the ability to create something that impacts society and does not leave them indifferent.
Positivism:
Positive people and teams are more creative. Optimism allows us to adapt better and faster to new contexts and also produces positive emotions, relevant aspects when it comes to questioning the world and promoting new forms of creation.
Relaxation:
The best ideas appear when the creative team is relaxed. Inspirational moments are found in quiet surroundings. We have to know how to waste time, forget about routine work, let our minds fly and give way to imagination.
III. Innovation
Faced with the phenomenon of globalization, virtualization and transdisciplinarity, organizations are subject to a constant change of scenery, which implies that in addition to being creative, they have to be innovative, in order to be competitive in a changing world. Not innovating is perishing.
A business innovation is an improvement in the business model that a company has, is to make major organizational, productive or technological changes in the proposal that makes a business to the market with the sole purpose of being more efficient and achieving a better position in the market or even create a totally new market where there are no competitors.
The COTEC Foundation defines innovation as "the art of converting ideas and knowledge into new or improved products, processes or services that the market values".
As vital as innovation, it is the dissemination and commercialization that allow the idea generated to be used. Innovation that is not known is as if it did not exist.
Innovation in management
For Phillip Kotler, the path to be followed by any company that has a market leader position is to continuously innovate its products and services. This will help the business protect its cherished market position and avoid frontal attacks from industry competitors. Likewise, it indicates that a business innovation strategy applied in a business must be translated into bringing the following four benefits to the market:
- Continuously generate new products. Offer better quality service for the customer. Reduce company costs. Have more efficient distribution channels to deliver their products.
Some of the main virtues of companies that carry out business innovations are:
- They adapt easily to changes in the market. They are agile internally to develop new products and services. They have a long-term vision aimed at changing the status quo of an industry. They create competitive advantages that are absolutely overwhelming.
There are two main purposes that a business innovation has:
The first is to increase the competitive efficiency of a company, by making substantial changes in the internal processes of the company in order to make the organization much more competitive than the rest of the competitors in an industry.
The second aim is focused on increasing the value that customers perceive with the products and services that a business offers, this through a reconversion of the company's business model, where research and development is essential to find opportunities to be exploited in a certain market.
A resource that can be very useful around generating a business innovation strategy is by applying the famous "blue ocean" strategy. This strategy is based on creating a product with high added value for customers, which is totally different from what is currently offered in the market, to convert all those people who are not customers of a product into new customers.
The reconversion in the business model of a company is based on 4 pillars: creating, increasing, reducing or eliminating, any important variable that competes in an industry.
Innovation strategies
Implementing a blue ocean strategy in an SME or entrepreneurial project is not an easy task, it is quite an in-depth analysis exercise where you have to discover the main variables that compete in an industry, in order to change the entire structure of a company and only focus on certain variables, so the other variables of a business will have less or no importance, once having the above, we continue to apply the four main pillars of this strategy on each of the main variables of industry, these pillars are: create, increase, reduce or eliminate, any important variable that competes in an industry.
Delete a variable:
The blue ocean strategy proposes to eliminate any variable in an industry that can help reduce the price of a product or that in a business model would not have any importance when optimizing the rest of the business. An example of this can be found in low-cost airlines who have eliminated first-class seats from traditional airlines. By doing this, they were able to significantly reduce the cost of a plane ticket and at the same time the spaces to be offered on any plane route were optimized.
Reduce a variable.
When transforming a business model, those variables that are not so important or that make the price of a product more expensive are reduced, here several different paths can be followed, on the one hand the quality or quantity of parts of a product in order to make it cheaper, on the other hand, the delivery time or waiting to receive any service could be reduced, making the client perceive it to be of higher quality. If we take a clear example of how to reduce a variable in an industry, let's take the example of a chain of pizzas, who reduced the complexity of a pizza by only offering pizzas with two combinations of ingredients, likewise reduced the delivery time of a pizza to less than 5 minutes, making this a high value proposition with which your clients benefited.
Increment a variable.
When talking about increasing a variable in a blue ocean strategy, it is focused on the fact that these variables considerably benefit the value proposition of any product or service, thus seeking to increase things such as: quality of service, use of material It is premium that a product is cheaper or that a variable that has low current importance in an industry is increased. An example of this pillar can be found at Starbucks, they developed a blue ocean by increasing the comfort level of their facilities compared to a traditional cafeteria, in the same way they focused on increasing the time that a person stayed at their facilities, with Which his clients found a space of high comfort where Starbucks could sell coffee up to four times above its traditional value.
Create a variable.
This strategy focuses on exploiting creativity and inventing new variables that are not present in an industry today, you can even take variables from other industries to enter the game of the industry in which you compete. An example of variables that are created for a blue ocean strategy we have in the Circo du Soleil that created a new concept of entertainment by taking elements of the theater and the circus, mixed them and created a new form of refined entertainment of high value for the clients.
Example of innovative companies
The Fast Company magazine presents an annual list that brings together the 50 most innovative companies, with firms that stand out for introducing new solutions for consumers and for presenting profitable and innovative business models. The top five companies, from the list of 50 innovators in 2014 are:
Today's most successful Internet company turns 16. It is determined to be more than a search engine, despite the fact that Google is best known for that function, and more than an advertising platform, although the vast majority of its income comes from ads. Google is carrying out projects that could reinvent the company like Calico, a spin-off company that wants to "extend human life expectancy".
Bloomberg Philanthropies.
It is one of the largest and most effective foundations in the United States, concentrating its efforts on tobacco deaths. In addition, it drives innovation in American cities.
Xiaomi.
The Chinese startup reinvented mobile telephony in the world's largest market with cheap smartphones.
Dropbox.
With new tools such as Saver, Chooser and Datastore it allows you to further exploit the potential of the cloud, such as maximizing the synchronization of different devices.
Netflix.
It practically turned the way of watching television, now it can work as an application available for any device.
IV. conclusion
From the aforementioned, it can be affirmed that the organizations of the third millennium require managers with related competencies to generate, foster and enhance creativity in the organization, so that it leads them to maintain competitive advantages, maintain a long-term relationship with their clients and convert potential clients into clients.
The creative company stands out for its reorientation capacity, which refers to the ability to observe changes in the environment such as opportunities and risks. They have originality and capacity for creation, corresponding to the ability of a company to generate a constant flow of ideas that, apart from being unique (original), are useful and achievable. Seldom can a company survive on a single idea, no matter how great it may turn out to be. They show flexibility and transformation, where flexibility is the ability of a company to find financial and human resources that allow the implantation of new ideas. Transformation capacity refers to the virtue of a company to adapt its structures and processes to the demands of these new ideas, be they new products,services, processes, policies or strategies. And they must show a creative reputation, corresponding to the virtue of a company to encourage the creativity of its employees and stand out from the competition through unique and original products and services, this is precisely what attracts its customers.
On the other hand, the management of modern companies is characterized by maintaining relevant and well-defined innovation strategies. Innovation is not an end, but a means to achieve the organization's strategic objectives. Innovative companies take the lead in the markets where they operate. Most innovative companies have a lot of creative employees with lots of ideas. Some of those ideas are relevant to the needs of those companies. The entrepreneurial culture of an innovative company is that employees are given the freedom and encouragement to fail, because if employees believe that being part of a failed project will have professional consequences, they will avoid any risks and therefore the innovation like the plague.Innovative companies offer their employees a trusted environment. There is a lot of risk in innovation. Very creative ideas often sound like nonsense. If employees fear making a fool of themselves, exchanging outlandish ideas, they will not share these ideas. Similarly, if employees are afraid to participate in projects that fail, they will not. Individual and team autonomy is a key component of innovation. If you give both goals clear along with the freedom to find your own way to achieve those goals, you create fertile ground for innovation.If employees are afraid to participate in projects that fail, they will not. Individual and team autonomy is a key component of innovation. If you give both goals clear along with the freedom to find your own way to achieve those goals, you create fertile ground for innovation.If employees are afraid to participate in projects that fail, they will not. Individual and team autonomy is a key component of innovation. If you give both goals clear along with the freedom to find your own way to achieve those goals, you create fertile ground for innovation.
Finally, the competent manager will implement the correct innovation strategies in order to achieve the objectives of the organization.
V. References
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