I recently gave a presentation at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design on a topic entitled “Is creativity management an oxymoron?”
The essential confusion to people resistant to the idea of “creativity management” was the word “management.” Replace it with the word “optimization” and the resistance disappears; all we’re really trying to do is optimize the quality of the idea pool and optimize the implementation process. Then you can suggest that most people already implicitly accept the idea of creativity management: if you ask them to solve a problem or engage in a particular endeavour, one of the things they’re likely to do is herd people into a room with a flip chart and conduct some sort of brainstorming session and implicit in that action is the acceptance that certain methods, processes and procedures enhance creative output. Ironically, it is in the business world that this topic has been most elaborately studied and applied – because businesses constantly have to create and sell new products and maintain competitive advantage in innumerable ways.
