ENT | 6

Entrepreneurship Part 6 - Creativity and ENT

You didn’t come this far to only come this far! Welcome back to part 6 of the series of entrepreneurship.

In part 6 of the series entrepreneurship we will have a look on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. By that we’ll go through the three components of creativity, use some techniques of creativity, define and explain the sources of innovation, discuss different types of innovation and in the end explain the links between creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas

Linus Pauling (Winner of Peace and Chemistry Nobel Price)

The process of entrepreneurship starts with ideas for new services, products, business models or organizations - both in startups as well as existing organizations. Therefore different concepts of creativity and innovation are intrinsically tied to each other and some minds say that they cannot exist without the other.

Before we continue we want to define the three keywords in this section and what our understanding is of them:

Innovation
is generally understood as the successful introduction of a new thing or method which is the embodiment, combination, or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes or services (Luecke&Katz | 2003).

Creativity
”is the process through which invention occurs - the enabling process by which something new comes into existence.”

Innovation Management
is the discipline of managing processes in innovation, in order to respond to external or internal opportunities and using creative efforts to introduce new ideas, processes or products (Kelley&Kranzburg | 1978)

Idea classification matrix (cf. Neck 2010)

Using this approach we can say that creativity is in general defined as coming up with new ideas and innovation is implementing those. (cf Goddard 2008). But also when you goole the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into products, services or business models where customers are willing to pay for. Having an idea is always the starting point of an innovation no matter if you have it by yourself or in a team workshop.

Looking on Innovation we have to separate them into different types of innovation:

Service/Product Innovation
Introducing new services or products or a combination of both

Process Innovation
Just think about SMED and the EMIPS methodology (eliminate, minimize, integrate, parallelize and synchronize).

Social Innovation
New developments to get rid of social unacceptable conditions.

Structural/Organizational Innovation
Organizational development that supports all value adding activities of an organization.

Last but not least we differentiate between incremental and disruptive innovation. Those can be described as followed and are relevant for product-, process- or service-innovation:

Incremental Innovation

• Steady improvements

• Based on sustaining technologies

• Obedience to cultural routines and norms

• Can be rapidly implemented

• Immediate gains

• Develop customer loyalty

Disruptive Innovation

• Fundamental rethinking

• Based on disruptive technologies

• Experimentation and play/make believe

• Needs to be nurtured for long periods

• Worse initial performance, potential big gains

• Create new markets