Unleashing Creativity and Innovation: Nine Lessons from Nature for Enterprise Growth and Career Success

Part II

The Four Requirements for the Mind to Generate Creative Ideas

Hasbro’s key skill is our ability to design and make great games and toys. We develop intellectual property, so it’s important to develop the creativity and skills of our people.

—Al Verrecchia, CEO, Hasbro Inc.

Creativity in the Business World

Creativity is the process of generating ideas—ideas that will help the enterprise become more competitive in the marketplace. Business creativity means generating ideas that improve customer experience, create new products, increase revenue/market share, or improve efficiency.

Quarterly earnings are the score. Unique processes, value propositions, capabilities, customer experiences, and market positioning—all products of creative and innovative thinking—determine the score.

What if We Typed Using Only Our Thumbs? The Birth of the BlackBerry

In the mid-1990s, Research in Motion (RIM) was a modestly successful pager company. But founder Mike Lazaridis saw potential in the idea of a portable email device. He began to consider what it might look like, what it could do. He imagined something much smaller than a laptop but easier to type on than a phone. Laptops were already shrinking and bumping up against limitations on how small a QWERTY keyboard could reasonably get. Lazaridis stepped back to consider how a much tinier keyboard could be feasible—and he achieved a leap of logic: What if we typed using only our thumbs? He soon had a prototype and concrete feedback from it. ...