1、A report from the Deloitte Australia Centre for the EdgeSetting the stage for creative performanceImproving creativity in business by measuring creativityThe Deloitte Australia Centre for the Edge, which is part of our global research network, is designed to help businesses profit from emerging tech
2、nology opportunities. Technology developments strike at the very heart of a business and finding strategies for corporate growth is essential. Our mission is to identify and explore opportunities that arent yet on senior managements agenda but should be. While were focused on long-term trends and op
3、portunities, we also look at the implications for near-term action.As a client, you can benefit not only from the centers international research, but also from the Australian chapters research on issues affecting the local operating environment.About the Deloitte Australia Centre for the EdgeHuman C
4、apital ConsultingDeloittes Human Capital consulting leverages design-thinking, digital innovation, and data-driven industry insights to develop and implement talent and HR strategies that enhance our clients organizational value through their people, in particular innovative talent, leadership, and
5、change programs. Contact the authors for more information or read more about our human capital services on D.au.ContentsA creative business needs a creative ecosystem 2It takes a creative ecosystem to innovate 3A groups creativity depends on organizations, industries, and markets 4Investment/opportu
6、nity connects creative potential with creative performance 6Investment/opportunity is cost/benefits essential complement and partner 9Endnotes 102IN MARCH 2020, Scott Morrison, Australias prime minister, announced a ban on gatherings of more than 500 people. This could have spelled doom for Sydney-b
7、ased Stagekings, a builder of stage sets for some of the countrys biggest events. But instead of folding, Stagekings mounted a creative response that turned adversity into triumph. The company pivoted to making flat-packed, assemble-yourself furniture aimed at the suddenly huge market of people who
8、needed to work from home. The venture, branded IsoKing, grew so quickly that the firm had to hire workers rather than lay them off. With revenues of AUS$3.6 million in its first year, the new business is now larger than the old.1Why did some organizations manage to respond creatively to the pandemic
9、s existential threat, while others failed to adapt? Some reasons are obvious: astute leaders, adaptable workers, flexible governance processes, and the like. However, creativity depends on more than what an organization does within its own four walls. IsoKing, for example, markets itself almost excl
10、usively through Facebook2but what if Facebook, or other platforms that allow for easy, low-cost publicity, didnt exist? And what if the demand for build-at-home furniture hadnt burgeoned during the pandemic, creating a favorable market?Examples like this show that organizations pursuing creativity h
11、ave an interest in fostering an ecosysteman industry and market environmentconducive to creativity, one that is receptive to new and useful ideas, and which enables the operational flexibility required to bring them to market.The challenge for organizational leaders is to know what they can do, and
12、how much they should do, to shape that ecosystem, to provide the space for their organization to be creative. After all, an organization cant control an industry or market in the same way as it can control its own internal workings. Leaders need to think carefully about where to focus their and thei
13、r organizations efforts to create a more creative ecosystem, and how to be sure that these efforts are worth the investment.A creative business needs a creative ecosystemDEFINING CREATIVITYDecades of research into creativity have arrived at the consensus that creativity is not an ineffable thing. It
14、 can in fact be defined: Its the creation of something novel and useful, a creative work, where work can be taken quite broadly to include physical objects, theorems or strategies, systems for understanding the world, stories and narratives, or music that can be performed again and again.Novelty on
15、its own is not enough. A creative work must also be seen as useful, helping the community move toward its goals. Defining creativity in terms of novelty and usefulness implies that creativity is contextual. Novel and useful to whom? Where? When? This relativity also implies that while the individual
16、 or team is important to creativity, other factors are also, and sometimes even more, important.Setting the stage for creative performance3CREATIVITY IS TYPICALLY seen as the work of a team or individualthe product of a group (even if its a group of one). The focus is on producing a creative work su
17、ch as a film, novel, or fashion linetreating creativity as a thing, a noun. But we should also consider creativity as a verb, as creative acts where we engage in new ways with other teams, partners, collaborators, or even the market, as Stagekings did. While creativity as a noun is concentrated in g
18、roupscentralized creativitycreativity as a verb is spread across the firm and the ecosystem that surrounds itdistributed creativity.3Centralized and distributed creativity are not separatetheyre interdependent and intertwined. For instance, a restaurant chains marketing team might come up with the i
19、dea for a burger of the week, a creative work produced by centralized creativity. But turning the idea into a real-life campaign will depend on many other creative acts across the business, acts distributed among other teams and ecosystem partners. The procurement team might, for example, need to de
20、velop lightweight vendor-vetting and -onboarding processes if the burger of the week is to be successful. To accomplish these distributed creative acts, the marketing team and the groups it works with will likely need to find new ways to engage with each other.The success of firms such as Stagekings
21、 during the pandemic relied not just on the creativity of individual groups, but on these groups finding new ways to work together as well as on the firm finding new ways to work with other firms and with the market. One could even argue that it is the creative acts that distinguish successful innov
22、ation from less noteworthy efforts.4 Indeed, the inability of many otherwise creative firms to respond creatively to the pandemic might be attributed to a surplus of centralized creativity and a dearth of distributed creativity. It takes a creative ecosystem to innovateCREATIVE WORKS AND CREATIVE AC
23、TS: WHATS THE DIFFERENCE?All creative works are the result of creative acts, though not all creative acts result in something that we would immediately recognize as a creative work. Creative works are the nouns, the things, that result from creativity. Creative acts, on the other hand, form the verb
24、, the act of being creative.In business, we focus on creative works, assuming that a creative work is the result of an act of creation, the product of a creative marketing, design, or innovation group. What is often forgotten is that bringing a creative work to life will likely require many creative
25、 acts across the organization and across the organizations ecosystem.Improving creativity in business by measuring creativitySource: Adapted from C. M. Ford, “Theory of individual creative action in multiple social domains,” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 4, 1996, p. 1112-1142.FIGURE 1Creativi
26、ty operates at multiple levels within and outside an organizationMarketInstitutionalOrganizationalGroupConsumers, customers,and clientsInnovation: the creativity of products and services in the market as a wholeAn organizationsexternal ecosystem:partners, suppliers, and the institutions it interacts
27、 withNew and valuable approaches to engage with the ecosystem across an industry or sectorThe organization within its four wallsFinding and enabling new and effective ways to engage acrossthe organizationIndividuals and the teams theybelong toThe creation ofa new and useful thing:creative work produ
28、ctsLevelWho it coversCreativity is Outside theorganizationInside theorganization4WHEREAS CENTRALIZED CREATIVITY is the product of a group, distributed creativity is a different beast, working at multiple levels within and outside the organization (figure 1). This is important because each level shap
29、es the creativity of the level below.A groups creativity depends on organizations, industries, and marketsSetting the stage for creative performance5An organization that encourages its teams to approach problems creativelyand which provides the space for them to be creativewill inspire more creativi
30、ty among its teams than one that measures its teams on strict adherence to predefined specifications, budgets, and timelines. Teams that can, when necessary, request and obtain modifications to their original project plan are more apt to engage in the experimentation and iteration that leads to more
31、 creative outcomes than teams obliged to deliver to specification no matter what.Similarly, if industry norms and practices discourage operating outside a strict set of conventions, organizations will have little incentive to develop creative approaches. For instance, quantity surveying conventions
32、in the construction industry, which historically rely on onsite inspections, can make it difficult for construction firms to move work to offsite locations where they can realize safety and productivity benefits.5Finally, idiosyncrasies in how a market functions can create headwinds for the adoption
33、 of a novel product or service. Particularly novel products and services can face incredible obstacles in part because they lack legitimacy with consumers.An immediate insight from this layered model is that it is not enough for an organization to invest in improving the creativity of groups. Leader
34、s must also invest in improving the creative potential of the higher-level layers: organizational, institutional, and market. Additionally, they must resolve mismatches between these layers if creative potential is to be maximized. A decision or convention in a layer above might unnecessarily constr
35、ain the layer below, as with the quantity surveying example described above where institutional conventions hinder efforts to develop a new approach to operations. Management, and possibly even an organizations senior executive team, might need to invest time in working across organizational and ins
36、titutional divides to collaborate on developing new conventions and approaches that will provide the firm with more creative freedom.Improving creativity in business by measuring creativity6Creative potential refers to the factors that influence how creative an outcome will be. Creative performance
37、is the creative outcome itself, the new object, idea, or behavior that results from creative potential.THE KEY TO determining whether an investment is worth it is through metrics.Investments in creativity are directed toward increasing creative potential, the factors that influence how creative the
38、outcome might be. A range of factors at each level of our layered model can influence the potential for creativity. Choosing to only operate in a single, tightly regulated industry, for example, results in less creative potential than working across a diverse range of industries as this means that n
39、ovel ideas have a greater chance of finding a useful home. (W. L. Gore has leveraged this strategy to great effect.)6 Even if a firm chooses to work within a single industry, its leadership might actively engage with the industrys institutions and members to find new and more flexible approaches to
40、working together to create more room to be creative.7Creative performance is the creative outcome itself, the new object, idea, or behavior that results from creative potential. Importantly, creative performance is not binary, with some outcomes creative and others not; its a continuum. Metrics for
41、creative performance tell us where on this continuum a particular outcome lies.Metrics for creativity are a little different from the more standard calculation of costs and benefits, because while creativity comes at a cost, it is not a sure thing. Its a numbers game, in which even if we have all th
42、e right ingredients, sometimes creativity just doesnt spark. Thus, investments in creative potential are just that: investments in improving the potential for a creative outcome. Creative performance, on the other hand, represents the opportunity, the value of the outcome that could arise out of cre
43、ative potential.We can connect investments to improve creative potential with the outcomes creative performance via an “investment/opportunity” metric to make this relationship tangible.Measuring the investmentMeasuring investments in creative potential is a matter of determining how much time, mone
44、y, and effort it would take to enable a group, organization, industry, or market to be more creative. For groupsteams and individualsthis investment might be used to create space in (usually tight) Investment/opportunity connects creative potential with creative performanceSetting the stage for crea
45、tive performance7schedules to investigate and experiment with alternatives, before being forced to arrive at a solution. Investments may also be made to pull in a more diverse set of perspectives or to provide training in methodologies, such as design thinking, which can be useful when seeking novel
46、 and useful solutions. The payoff, if the investments in improving group creative performance are effective, will be an improvement in the organizations creative performanceits ratio of creative hits to misses should increase. If this isnt the case, then the organization can dig into the detailed da
47、ta to see which investments had the higher payoff and adjust the creativity investment strategy to suit.If group creativity plateaus, then organizational leaders might also need to consider investing in the creative potential of the organization as a whole. Recall that the creativity of groups is af
48、fected by the governance processes and management practices imposed by the organization they work for. Investments at the organizational level thus likely entail evolving these governance and management practices to provide groups with more flexibility, more room to be creative. This might require,
49、for example, factoring investment/opportunity metrics into program and project portfolio governance processes, so that a project or programs creative potential and performance, not just its cost and benefit, are formally considered. Or risk management practices might need to be reconsidered to enabl
50、e the development of a new, lightweight approach to vetting suppliers for new ingredientsfor instanceto support a burger of the week initiative.If we move outside the firm, where organizational leaders have less controlindustry conventions and regulation will determine what is easy and what is diffi
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