Creativity doesn’t spark in a vacuum. Nurturing it with the right ingredients and trusting in the eventual payoff is what sets a creative business apart

Sparking Creativity

All organizations that prioritize innovation understand that they need to focus on their people—the groups charged with developing new and useful things to take to market. The research on creativity conventionally terms these groups as the creative person—the individuals and teams (and their skills, talents, knowledge, and experience) involved in creative work. This is where most organizations direct their investments in creativity—toward hiring people with the “right” skills and putting them to work.

However, research into creativity also points to three more factors that shape creative outcomes: process, place, and product. Process is a creative team’s development journey, the steps and actions they take to do the work. Place refers to the setting in which the work is done, covering everything from access to material resources to high-level organizational policies and governance to an organization’s culture and its social norms. And product is the creative work itself—the new object, idea, or behavior that the organization hopes to commercialize.

Investing in the Five P’s

The five P’s are a useful way to think through what kinds of investments an organization can make to increase its ratio of creative hits to misses. Investments in creative potential aim to make person, process, and place more conducive to generating and realizing creative ideas. Investments in creative performance aim to remove creative barriers, (re)defining creative products and enabling persuasion to create space for ideas to flourish.

Person

While person is not the only source of creativity, it’s still essential to equip teams with skills and knowledge that they can draw on to come up with and develop creative ideas, and to judge when creativity is (and isn’t) appropriate.

Process

Research suggests that the creative process is most effective when it’s iterative, allowing teams to engage in multiple cycles of divergence (generating new ideas) and convergence (winnowing out the poor ideas and developing the good ones).

Place

Place, the setting in which person and process operate, is important for creating favorable conditions for both. Besides the actual physical and virtual work environment and tools, place also extends to culture, norms, and expectations.

Product

In one sense, the creative product is an output—the thing or idea born of person, process, and place. At the same time, the way in which the product is defined can also be an important input to its eventual value. Just as we need to create space in the process for it to be a creative process, we also need to create space with the product if it is to be a creative product.

Persuasion

The last of our P’s, persuasion, is essential to securing the support required to make the other four P’s productive. The major investment here is in integrating creativity into governance mechanisms to allow leaders to consider creativity’s “investment-opportunity” value alongside the more usual cost-benefit metrics. In this way, creativity and efficiency can be put on an equal footing in an organization’s operating model—otherwise, efficiency will always trump creativity.