Do you want to achieve success in everything you do? Probably yes. But, the path to success has many different crosses. And in most cases, some paths will require building yourself before you achieve desired success. Creativity is an important thing you need if you want to achieve success.
Many industries and markets do not have an extensive maneuvering space when it comes to innovation, or they just use that stereotype to find an excuse because of their own non-inventiveness and lack of creativity.
Why You Need Creativity?
To succeed in coming to a great idea, whether it’s related to a new product or service, process or business model, a critical characteristic that you will need to own is creativity.
It is clear that in a large number of companies, markets or industries there is a kind of standardized form when it comes to products or services, processes or a business model. However, that little that can be done in a different way is an excellent opportunity to provide a competitive advantage for you.
Sometimes you do not have the opportunity to innovate new products or services, but one thing that I know with certainty is that you will always have a lot of room for innovation in processes or a brand new business model although the product or service is standardized.
Because of that, when you find yourself in such a situation, with limited space for innovation in products or services, your creativity should be directed to other opportunities such as excellent service, appropriate design of the business model, working hours, additional service, delivery on time, quality, speed, more choices for customers, etc. There is indeed an unlimited number of options available to differentiate you. However, if creativity is not at the desired level, your company will just remain at the same level as other market participants.
How can you increase your own creativity? I will provide some recommendations that do not go into those that are common but which can help you in this process:
1. Start by yourself
Yes, you need to start with yourself and ask yourself what you would like most when buying products and services that you or your company is offering to your customers. Or, what are the biggest problems that you face today and how you will solve them?
Yes, if you want to change the world, you will need to start with yourself. Think about different problems and their current solutions. What you want to change. You need to have self-confidence if you want to change the world and train your brain to look into the future.
2. Then move to your broader community
Ask the same questions you ask yourself in the previous step your relatives and friends. Also, you can ask the same questions on social media where you probably already have a broader community.
Don’t focus on structured questions because they give directions to the respondents in a way you want to respond. You want to use open questions, where someone can give you different thoughts related to the subject you are researching.
Your creativity will increase when you find information for other people’s problems, solutions and how they solve some specific problems.
3. Go outside your building
Go outside your building and take a look and see what happens to other people or your competitors if you want to solve problems for your business. Ask yourself why someone buys something from your competitors. Also, why they chose your competitors instead of you and what is that something that attracts customers to them? What is something that keeps them to continue to buy their products and services?
4. Go outside your industry
Don’t limit yourself to your own industry. If you want to be a leader, it’s not enough just to find out what the competition offers and do it in a better way. You will need to bring innovations that do not exist at all in your industry. The creativity for such innovations can easily come if you start studying companies that are outside of your industry.
Mixing problems and solutions from several industries can bring you a totally new view on what you are doing now, and what you will need to do in the future.
5. Try Connecting the Dots
If you have different ideas, concepts, and understanding of different things, you will need to connect different dots to create a totally different view of the things around you.
The first thing you need to be able is to recognize what happens around you and take notes in order to better process collected information.
The best way is to put out everything you have in your mind. Currently, I am using GoodNotes when I collect information and think about expanding details and relationships. Then when I get some structure in the collected data, I use the mind-mapping tool. You can use more sophisticated tools for this purpose like mind mapping software. In many of the cases for this purpose, I am using Scapple, XMind or MindNode. After I connect different things in my mind and add some new information from research about the concept in Scapple, I move all things inside Mind mapping software to create some structure.
In such a way everything that was in my mind without any order becomes much more structured.
