Alan Robinson and Sam Stern are the writers of the book “Corporate Creativity“, in which they setup six essential elements to manage creativity in large corporations. A company is creative when its employees do something new and potentially useful without being directly shown or taught.

Creativity is one of the drivers behind innovation. It is often assumed that creativity is reserved for small start-ups or Google-like companies in Silicon Valley. However, the writers argue that a company’s creative potential rapidly increases with its size.

The larger the company, the more likely that the components of a creative act are already present, but the less likely that they will be brought together without some help.

The six principles to stimulate corporate creativity are:

1. Alignment: Direct the interests & actions of employees towards business objectives
2. Self-initiated activity: Make use of the natural human drive to explore and create
3. Unofficial activity: Encourage employees to explore activities that occurs in the absence of direct official support, and with the intent of doing something new and useful
4. Serendipity: Enable serendipitous discoveries by fortunate accidents in the presence of sagacity (keenness of insight)
5. Diverse Stimuli: A stimulus may provide fresh insight into something a person has already set out to do, or it may bump that person into something different.
6. Within company communication: Leverage the creative potential of your employee base by bringing employees in contact with each other.

suggested reading

• Robinson A.G., Stern S., (1998) Corporate Creativity, How innovation and improvement actually happen, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Employee-survey.org

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