Creativity is about doing arts, right? Absolutely not! Creativity does not only concern artists that draw a new painting or potters while creating a new piece. Creativity is a part of the base of our normal every-day functioning. Imagine situations in which you think of different ways on how to study more effective, or if you are at work trying to change your schedule creatively. We want to put your focus on businesses now: Have you ever thought “What if businesses would not be creative”? We want to answer this question, why creativity is important in businesses.

Everything is moving, new inventions are coming up, the digitalisation, society’s growing expectations to serve their interests. Businesses have one big job: keeping up. Therefore, they have to be creative to come up with innovations, to adapt to the needs of customers and to be up to date with the competition.

Keeping up:

But how?

There are businesses that came up with several ideas to stimulate their employee’s creativity by giving them space to relax, letting them play games or to openly discuss ideas. There are even some that introduced an 80% week where the fifths day is for “free work” where one can explore his/her own ideas. Others do mindfulness trainings with their employees or meditation which can lead to further ideas.

Something unexpected

Thinking inside the box in a business:

We are always reinforced to “think outside the box”. But we discovered that this is often not possible. Businesses for example can have major constraints as e.g. limited resources such as money or time. They also have to create something in the vision of their clients as e.g. in marketing. There are actually people who propose that constraints actually make you even more creative and maybe that one or the other big company only got so great by having the “chance of constraints”.
As you can see, creativity is included in many different areas of life, especially in business. Not only through upcoming with new ideas or products, but also how to enhance one’s working atmosphere or productivity. Therefore, we would like to invite you to think about areas, where you might not have seen creativity before! Maybe even where you engaged in being creative without noticing…

Creativity in Marketing

Businesses get nowhere if they don’t stand out. The market is full of competition, with products just as good as yours. The trick lays in finding uniqueness, and then communicating it in equally unique ways. Snickers, for example, found a way to distinguish the brand from other successful chocolate bars like Milky Way and Twix by focusing on the value proposition that Snickers “satisfies”. Take a look at the following ad to see how the brand communicates its value proposition creatively, while also managing to engage and entertain its target audience:

Let’s say you’re running low on energy after a tiring football match, and you want to eat something fast and fulfilling; You prefer the taste of Milky Way, but you then end up buying Snickers at that moment because you think it will make you fuller. That’s the power of creativity in communicating a corporate message: it makes it linger in the audience’s minds for longer, has a stronger impact and successfully shows the brand’s uniqueness.
Again, businesses get nowhere if they don’t stand out. A creative approach is what will make a business shine brighter than its competitors.

Certainly, creativity plays a big part in the field of business and so does it for banking. As the financial industry is currently experiencing its probable most significant disruption, creativity and innovation may serve as a valuable means for adaptation and thus to develop banking business models. Especially Fintech start-ups have posed serious challenges to the incumbent financial institutions which have shifted the focus increasingly onto customer expectations. Initial banking business no longer serve the purpose and it has become widely accepted that established banks must become more comfortable with the industry’s pace of innovation in order to survive. May ‘creativity’ be of an advantage?

Creativity in Banking

In order to be competitive and grow where margins are low, competition is tough, regulations are changing and technology has an increasing impact, financial institutions need to consider creative innovation a top priority. Organizational cultures increasingly change in order to support innovations that impact increasingly outdated business models. Banks and credit unions are working on also anticipating consumer needs and develop innovations that prioritize the most effective mix of skills, processes and people. This requires ‘creativity’ – and employees that think ‘outside’ of the usual business model.

Banks will form collaborations, merge with existing businesses or even establish ventures with its rivals in order to survive disruption and CREATE – something that has not been an intrinsic feature of this industry so far.

Such innovations currently being implemented range from faster online payments and personalised customers engagements to Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven customer predictive analyses that allows to depict information with the goal of proactively changing customers’ everyday behaviours, with figures and insights contextually delivered.

The Banking industry is changing. Innovation and thus creativity are becoming its prime assets.

Creativity in Healthcare

There is no innovation without creativity. Creativity is needed to find solutions to make healthcare faster, more convenient, cheaper or better. Innovation is needed to improve healthcare quality and keep costs manageable.

Social and technological trends are expected to gain momentum in the coming years. And that offers opportunities for healthcare. However, in the health sector there are many laws, rules and guidelines, but also the standardized protocols that doctors and nurses must work with. This makes it is quite difficult to be creative and to innovate. In the health sector it is thus important to think inside the box.

Pharmaceutical companies innovate by developing new medicines to cure or treat new and existing diseases. Companies such as Philips and KPN use creativity to develop new machines to treat or monitor patients. And the supercomputer from IBM that supports doctors in diagnosing and treating patients is also an example of how creativity is implemented in the health sector.

There is also talk to implement a course on creativity into the curriculum of medical schools. It would teach the doctors of tomorrow so much about themselves and about problem-solving techniques they could use daily, no matter what their eventual medical specialty will be. They could also learn how to prescribe creativity as a drug-free alternative or adjunctive treatment for a wide variety of conditions, including PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), schizophrenia, adolescent behavioral problems, and even terminal illness.

Creativity in Process Innovation

In the business reality of the 21st-century, creativity concerning the reengineering of administrative, operational, and productive processes is an inescapable necessity in order not to lose presence in the market. The formula for success seems to be I&D+i (investigation, development, and innovation), to which lately, a "d" of disclosure has been added, in the sense that a creative innovation that is not counted does not count. In this context, an essential factor has been everything related to information technologies, social networks, media, etc. This has changed the interrelation channels, both inside and outside of companies; the current crisis of the Coronavirus has shown, that crucial parts of business activities can be transferred to the home office mode, which will result, for example, in a significant reduction in the demand for office space. In the operational part, creativity in innovation has led to the fact that today production processes are based on an organization of supply chain management "just in time" that has mostly eliminated the traditional warehouses. Concerning the productive value chain, the automation of processes, based on the sky rocking field of artificial intelligence through the increasing implementation of processes by robots, has shortened times and added precision.

Creativity in business – a psychological approach

Besides the importance of creativity within a companies, business-creativity can spill over to its consumer: increasing our own level of creativity!

Remember Apple’s slogan “Think Different”? Researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo found that we become more creative by merely thinking of Apple – with bricks at least. Participants of the study were flashed by Apple’s logo for just 30 milliseconds before writing down as many different uses of a brick as they could think of. Test subjects exposed to Apple’s brand image distinguished themselves from others by thinking differently as wel as thinking more creatively – both terms that reflect the way that Apple is perceived. This group of test subject came up with about 30 percent more “brick ideas” than their (IBM) counterparts. Whereas the “Apple group” stood out in level of creativity, test subjects exposed to IBM’s brand image performed especially well on competence – a concept strongly related to IBM’s brand image. In this way brands have a powerful affect on people’s unconscious behaviour such as their level of creativity, by merely existing. In this way, a companies’ creativity can have a powerful affect on people’s unconscious behaviour in addition to the necessity of creativity to the company itself.