Most creativity consultants will focus on “mind bending” or “creativity aptitude” or some such angle during their consultancy. However, this approach is rarely the most effective one.

The most useful tool consultants can give clients is a structured and tangible approach to enhanced creativity. This involves understanding creativity and innovation and doing away with some of the misconceptions.

The first rule is to define creativity and innovation. One useful definition is that creativity is problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation is idea selection, development and commercialisation. This allows clients to first focus on identifying problems – ask five people what the problem is and you will hear six different answers. It is not unusual that problem identification sessions alone continue for a few hours.

Each problem is the root of its own idea generating session. Again, tangibility is the key. Defining creativity as the number of ideas generated, the diversity and novelty of ideas, allows us to benchmark and improve on performance. There are an infinite number of techniques for generating more ideas and more novel and diverse ideas.

The above is simply the tip of the pyramid. Structure is also applied on many more levels:

Creating an organisational structure that allows the rapid generation of ideas but also their movement to decision makers. Here, there is much in common with Knowledge Management – it has to be transferred to where it is most useful.

Creating an organisational culture that fosters idea generation.

Creating an organisation teamed with motivated people. Intrinsically motivated people are much more likely to engage with a problem and come up with richer results. There are multiple levels of motivation (task feasibility, distance to ideal self, competency expansion, recognition and reward and so on).

Team structures. There is a huge difference between the productivity of various size teams. Large teams are inherently inefficient (politics, stunted information flows, status deference, social loafing, low idea elicitation and so on).

There is so much more…

You can read more about this topic, purchase the MBA dissertation, DIY audit, Power Point presentation, Good Idea Generator software and more fromhttp://www.managing-creativity.com/

The author is available for training, speaking and workshops in the london area.

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Kal Bishop, MBA

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Kal Bishop is a management consultant based in London, UK. His specialities include Knowledge Management and Creativity and Innovation Management. He has consulted in the visual media and software industries and for clients such as Toshiba and Transport for London. He has led Improv, creativity and innovation workshops, exhibited artwork in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London and written a number of screenplays. He is a passionate traveller. He can be reached at http://www.managing-creativity.com

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