Innovation: It’s all in the mind

How can organisations encourage a culture for innovation?

We find ourselves in the middle of the ‘cult of innovation’. How many business magazine covers have an innovation related article centre stage? A search on Amazon for ‘innovation’ among their books department provides a list of over 78,000 titles. Innovation is heralded as the great saviour for businesses and everyone wants a bit of innovative magic: be it incremental or disruptive, evolutionary or revolutionary. But innovation can only happen if individuals think creatively first. So if you want to develop innovation in your organisation you need to understand people first, and more particularly what influences their creativity.

Is creativity learned or innate? This is something that artists, leading thinkers and psychologists have debated over the centuries. For some it is a mysterious quality bestowed only on the chosen few, while others believe that it is a skill that can be developed. Both sides have entrenched views and can ‘prove’ their points, but like many things, the answer is likely to lie somewhere along the centre of the divides.

There are clearly very creative people who reveal their talents early in childhood, like Mozart composing and performing around Europe from the age of five. Academics who specialise in the psychology of personality have shown evidence that the traits of creativity correspond with certain personality factors. Personal characteristics like being open-minded, disagreeable, extroverted, sensation-seeking, risk-taking and narcissistic have been shown to correlate with measures of creativity across several psychological experiments.

However, there is a growing swell of psychologists and neuroscientists that believe creativity is something that can be improved with practice. Think about creativity as a muscle; where over time, training can make it stronger. Creativity is multi-faceted and it is not just about creative thinking or creative ability; in order to flourish it requires a complex cocktail of cultural contexts and personal attributes. For example, how we view ourselves impacts our creative output. Individuals’ who see themselves as ‘creative’ are more likely to behave creatively at work. But the really interesting part is that individuals’ beliefs about themselves are malleable and open to change. When participants in a study were led to see themselves as more creative and then given creative tasks, they rose to the challenge and did better than those who had not be primed to see themselves as creative. It is a little like ‘I think therefore I am’ — I think I am creative and then I am creative.

The work environment can unleash or suffocate creativity. Understanding how individuals feel, think and behave can help create work environments that encourage creativity. How can you help people to feel they have creative capacity? How can you make them think differently about themselves? How can you encourage behaviour where they are willing to put their head above the parapet with a new idea and then champion it within the business?

People are at the heart of all great creativity and understanding this is fundamental to great innovation. And creative thinking is not limited to specific departments; it can be encouraged throughout an organisation as a positive, smart and holistic way of approaching any business challenge.