The Courage to Create

The most important thing for many people today is to fulfill their dreams and reach their own full potential. To have a dream, an idea and make it come true - TO CREATE. But if creation is the most wonderful thing a human being can be part of - it is also the one process that demands the most courage.

To give people the possibility to be creative (from the Greek word creos, to create) is the most beautiful gesture you as a leader can make, but also often the move that make your employees (at least some) most scared. Why? Because it takes guts to find new ways, to go on even though there is much in doubt, to find that you were wrong and question the old values. To walk the path of creation is a journey on a road never used with rocks falling from above and sharks waiting in the water below. And only the creator can originally see the fantastic world of the future. The courage demanded stands in direct relationship to the implementation needed. The bigger the task, the more revolutionary the idea - the more willpower it takes. Therefore the creative hero needs to be confident, trust his emotional intelligence and his ideas and understand that there are contradictions in the world and that the process of change often goes through pain and anguish.

For Thomas Alva Edison it took years of experiments and many failures to reach his goal - the light bulb. Edison may not be the perfectly democratic or politically correct person of our standards, but it is still interesting to see what was his individual idea management concept as conceived by the Edison expert Richard Weddle:

Set goals for his number and type of ideas.
Came up with a minor idea every 10 days.
A major idea every 6 months.
He won 1,029 patents.
He took naps.
He pushed all he wanted to do through his two skill areas - electricity and chemistry.
Much of basic science evaded him.
He didn't care.
He didn't share credit for accomplishments.
He often suffered from crushing headaches.
He was very rough on his team.

... and Edison's businesses are worth well over $700 billion today. Whatever it took - Edison had the courage. A courage that could be used on much smaller tasks than revolutionizing the world of electrics, but for every step a person makes he or she gets a little braver in the next adventure awaiting in the product development office, or in life. Thus, to be really creative is not only a way of getting new ideas - it is a way of living a greater and braver life.

N E W S

Idélaboratoriet is proud to have been invited to speak at the meeting of the Swedish municipalities’ trade councils in Kristianstad this spring. A Crash Course in Innovation Management is a seminar held by Idélaboratoriet focused on how you can create a professional idea culture in your company to promote innovation.

Idélaboratoriet is also proud to be present a new tool for assessing the innovation potential of an organization – The Innovation Scorecard. This tool helps to analyze the innovative climate and structure of the organization and come up with ways to enhance these on three different levels – the organization, the team and the individual. Please contact us or take a look in the idea shop for more information - http://www.idelaboratoriet.com/good_ideas.asp.

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