Creativity and innovation

Creation is a large part of innovation. It is creativity that leads to innovation for example for a person to invent a whole new product they need to tap into their creative way of thinking. Also if it is not an invention of a product it could be a new way of doing things to improve the company if you were in the service industry. Creativity is all about thinking out side of the box for example look at this picture:
What do you see?

Some people see a young woman however some people see an old hag. This shows that people’s minds work in very different ways depending on how they think. In a business some employees will be able to see problems with products and services that others may not have even noticed like if I had not told you there is two ways to look at the picture you may not necessarily have seen it.
The old approach to creativity in the workplace was that the managers did all the creative thinking and “consultants were hired to help to achieve a breakthrough in products and markets” (Ahmed,P,2010) In my opinion this is a very naive and expensive way of running a business. Not only will it demotivate the employees but everyone has some level of creativity inside of them and in a company it is more than likely that some one knows the answer to your problem as they see it in a different light to you like the picture. There is now a new approach to creativity and this involves listening to staff getting lots of people involved.
Companies need creativity to make them stand out from the crowd “without a creative approach to the challenges facing them, there is a tendency to descend to the average of corporate practise”(Ahmed,P,2010) with no new ideas or ways of doing things differently the company will only be copying what is already out there and this is not what makes a market leader. Creativity’s main role in a business is problem solving coming up with techniques or ideas to solve a problem in the business however it has many other functions it can be used for problem finding so the directors of a company may not know about the problems that are happening on the shop floor there for using suggestion boxes and having meeting brings up these problems and solution that employees may have.
However you can have many creative ideas given by staff but for them to be effective the company need to implement them. This diagram shows the creativity to innovation process:

The ideas are generated by staff and selected so in this is a process of illumination ideas that the head of the company does not believe is relevant then the ideas have to be implemented which can be a very lengthy process. I feel that businesses need to make it a lot easier for change to happen for ideas to be tested. As this is the demotivating factor for employees they do not want to give ideas as when they do they are not implemented and are forgot about so what is the point. This very true as I have experienced this myself I work for McDonalds and I approached a manager and told her that I thought it would be a lot better if I was to give out condiments at window one to improve the times on the drive threw to which she replied no it works fine the way it does. This shows the reluctance to change they could have easily tried it for a day if it didn’t work then they could have changed it back but they would not because they did not want change and probably didn’t like that I am a crew member was suggesting a change as I do not have power.
(Ahmed,P and Shepard,C (2010). Innovation Management. Essex: Pearsons Education Limited. p3-49)