Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 5

Creating and Discovering a Creative Strategy Process

We began Creative Strategy by describing how strategy and creativity, despite being logical bedfellows, have never really fully engaged: they are hampered by five false separations and fully appreciating creative strategy requires joining five paradoxes. Chapter 2 then developed a rounded definition of creativity, before Chapter 3 examined ten reasons why strategic management may not have engaged with creativity to the extent that it should have. Subsequently, Chapter 4 updated a view of strategy in order that it might be fruitfully combined with our understanding of creativity.

Placing together the two systemic definitions, of creativity and strategy from previous chapters, enables us to define the content of creative strategy and its likely outcomes (see the figure overleaf) without too much trouble. The contents and outcomes columns that emerge here are relatively uncontentious. Numerous academic commentators, management gurus and practising managers agree on the need for radical, innovative strategies which transform markets, change the rules of competition and redefine businesses. What is less clear is an understanding of how the content and outcomes of creative strategies are formed – or what might be the process of creative strategy formation. Attempting to fill this gap in our understanding provides the impetus for this book.

Figure 5.1 The beginnings of a definitional framework for creative strategy

To simply ...