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Most people working with creativity and innovation swirls around new hot companies, buzzing trends or scenarios of the future like bees around honey, and tries to acknowledge certain factors that they can use in their everyday working life. But instead of looking ahead, what about looking for the answers for true innovation in the history of succesful historical movements like for example ancient Athens or renaissance Florence - movements that has sustained a high level of innovation for a long time, spawned geniuses and created new idioms.
The american Barton Kunstler of Lesley University School of Management has done just that and found 10 parameters or methods that creates the hothouse effect. If you would like to cultivate your own creative garden on a historical level - listen and learn:
1. Cultivate values that seeks to change the world. A creative hothouse believes it can create history.
2. Expose employees to high-level creative achievements outside of the organization. Attending and discussing cultural events is central for the creative spirit to arise.
3. Get physical. Exploration of the integration of body and mind and the five senses accelerates the cultivation.
4. Formalize a feedback loop in forms of internal discussions, customer knowledge, benchmarking et cetera that cycles peripheral inputs to the center of the organization.
5. Constantly review your intellectual capiltal. Reuse ideas and investigate paths that no know walked. Only a small percentage of the intellectual capital in a system is ever used.
6. Continually reevaluate the rules and processes of your organization. Challenge and provoke basic assumptions and try to loosen up and experiment with stiff "we-have-always-been-doing-it-this-way" methods.
7. Set up a "chart room" filled with input, ideas and links to new data. Establish ways to circulate these inspiring inputs in the organization.
8. Use an assessment instrument that attempts to measure innovation and continually puts central issues on the table.
9. Go beyond the office party or the usual coffee and cookie gathering. Make celebrations part of your agenda and create parties that engage people´s creativity and take them beyond the expected.
10. Teach people to trust themselves and make it possible for people to take chances and accept assignments that demands responsibility and involves personal risktaking.
Kunstler says that no single method alone can create a creative hotspot. The cultivation should be thought of as a serious and long term approach to changing the organization and over time the result will come with enduring results.
If you want to read more about the ideas of Barton Kunstler take a look at the magazine The Futurist Jan-Feb 2001.
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