Creativity Unlimited: Thinking Inside the Box for Business Innovation

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Why is creativity so important?

The only way to find new business opportunities and rise in the company hierarchy is to experiment, mutate and find new directions. Not all mutations and directions are successful, but together they guarantee that development is never halted. The economy and society are always dependent on new innovations that create new opportunities and offshoots for growth.

Between 5% and 20% of all products survive the promotion phase. The exact figures vary, of course, between product categories, which explains the wide range. But you may be sure that your promoted product's chances of survival will never be higher than 20%. There is a risk, in fact, that the odds are considerably worse – roughly 5% or 1 in 20.

This prospect might perhaps make you question whether creativity is really a good idea. Why create huge quantities of products (for a vast number of goods and services are introduced every year) that cost lots of money to launch and will, in all probability, have been eliminated from the market within a year without even earning their outlay? The answer to this question is worthy of a more extensive treatment, given later in the book. We should, rather, pose a completely different question first: Why do so many product launches fail? The answer to this question is that marketing creativity for the most part is far too low, whether or not product creativity ...