I have been working a lot on creativity teaching over these last years. As the founder of the Advanced Master in Creativity and Marketing at Solvay Brussels School, I happened to exchange a lot of ideas with my colleagues and friends among which Mark Raison, on the the most famous creativity trainer in this world http://fr.slideshare.net/mark.raison. Here what I got out of all this and mainly the rasons why business more than ever needs creative minds.
Reason 1: All recent marketing hits (Apple, Nespresso, Tesla,….) come from superior creativity, whether it’s market creation or radically new ways to do business
Reason 2: Confronted with technology, new media, globalization and an incredible diversification of supply sources, consumers and business customers don’t want to be just satisified, they want to be excited
Reason 3: “Lawyers, accountants, software engineers: that’s what Mom & Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of “left-brain” dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers...”, Daniel H Pink https://www.amazon.com/Whole-New-Mind-Right-Brainers-Future/dp/1594481717
Reason 4: You can be creative in math, science, music, dance, cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering. Any business today should be about generating original ideas that create value.
Reason 5: Nobody has a clue what the world’s going to look like in five or ten years, or even next year actually. If you can’t predict the future, invent it.
Reason 6: The challenges we currently face, from overpopulation to a shortage of natural resources, are without precedent. New problems call for new solutions. New opportunities call for new approaches.
Reason 7: “There is little to no time allotted for real thinking, brainstorming or experimentation without judgment. With so much pressure to produce quick results in the current economic environment, it may seem like a luxury to walk away from the mountain of tasks to be accomplished but, actually, it should be at the top of the management agenda”, Sandi Edwards, senior vice president at AMA Enterprise https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandi-edwards-21192b5
Reason 8: Today, developing a competitive adavantage, the base for business success and survival, requires innovation and creativity at the strategic level, not only at operational level.
Reason 9: If we still leave businesses and economies in the hand of purely rational people, it will lead to more disasters.
Reason 10: After all, what is life without pep, fun and excitement ?
Be inspired !
Jean-Pierre Baeyens 