Kathryn Jacob and Sue Unerman, marketing executives and co-authors of 'A Year of Creativity,' share insights on integrating creativity into daily work. They emphasize that innovation isn’t just for specific roles or brainstorming sessions but should be a regular practice. The duo discusses how to cultivate a culture of creativity, encouraging teams to challenge norms. They highlight innovative marketing strategies, including the bold Barbie campaign, and stress the significance of diverse perspectives and digital transformation for driving success in today's fast-paced environment.
Creativity should be practiced regularly like physical exercise, enabling individuals and teams to enhance their innovative thinking capabilities.
To unlock innovative solutions, organizations must integrate creativity into daily workflows and encourage everyone to contribute ideas consistently.
Deep dives
The Role of Consistent Creativity Practice
Creativity is essential for business success and should be practiced consistently, not just during occasional brainstorming sessions. Regular creativity exercises can help individuals and teams, regardless of their roles, cultivate their creative thinking abilities. The concept is likened to physical exercise, where just like maintaining fitness requires regular workouts, enhancing creativity requires continual practice. Engaging in small-scale creative activities each week can lead to significant improvements in generating innovative ideas and solutions.
Breaking Down Organizational Barriers to Creativity
Many organizations struggle to implement creative ideas generated during one-off brainstorming sessions, leading to wasted potential and talent. The conventional approach often results in a 'launch and leave' mentality, where ideas are not properly supported, funded, or followed through. To address this, creativity needs to be integrated into the daily workflow, encouraging regular ideation as part of every employee's responsibilities. By fostering a culture where everyone feels empowered to contribute creatively, companies can unlock a wealth of innovative solutions.
Using Constraints to Spark Innovation
Overcoming mental barriers can lead to breakthrough ideas, and one effective technique is to identify what you wouldn't do in a particular situation. This method encourages individuals and teams to challenge their assumptions and consider unconventional approaches, prompting creative thinking. An example is the unexpected success of the Barbie movie, which defied traditional expectations by combining themes of female empowerment with a playful marketing strategy. By embracing unique perspectives and asking provocative questions, organizations can discover innovative solutions that differentiate them in the market.
We all know that innovative thinking is vital to individual, team, and organizational success. But we still often put creativity in a box, assuming it's only for people in certain roles or best attempted once a year at an off-site brainstorming session. Marketing executives Kathryn Jacob and Sue Unerman argue that we all need to be exercising our creative muscles more regularly, especially in the age of AI, when routine work can be outsourced to algorithms but new thinking still comes from human minds. They offer prompts for spurring more creativity -- by yourself or with a team -- no matter where you work. Jacob and Unerman are the authors of the book A Year of Creativity: 52 Smart Ideas for Boosting, Creativity, Innovation, and Inspiration at Work.
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