Episode 23 - How to leverage creativity and innovation to grow your business.

Transcript:

Lou Quinto (00:18):

Hi, welcome to Q and A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Lou Quinto and I'm Craig P. Anderson. Today in our episode, our topic is going to be creativity versus innovation. A lot of times people confuse those two or are they use them interchangeably, but they're not. So what we're going to do is we're going to cover three areas as usual. Number one is what is creativity? Number two is what is innovation? And lastly, how do you create a culture that fosters both creativity and innovation? So Craig, why don't you kick us off with what's creativity?

Craig P. Anderson (01:11):

Well, creativity I think is easier. The two, I think it's probably the one that's less misunderstood than what innovation is. But creativity is really coming up with the ideas, right? It's the ideation cycle. It's brainstorming, it's design thinking, it's doing the mind map. It's getting kind of the group around and it's that whole thing of there are no stupid ideas except there's always somebody with a stupid idea.

But we'll set that aside. Right? Right. We can go back to the episode on brainstorming if you want more information about that and brainstorm is really the root of all of it. So as a matter of fact, we'll link to the brainstorming video in the end of this video today, so we'll have that in there for you. But that's really what creativity is, right? That's the idea is that's everything we're coming up with. That's where you bring a lot of people around the table to kind of say, all right, how do we do this differently? Or how do we do more of this? How can we get less of that? That's where you bring in the creative aspect and creativity sometimes is misunderstood. A lot of people think creativity is like advertising, creativity, marketing, creativity, where it's off the wall, you know, let's come in and we'll just throw a bunch of stuff on the wall.

Lou Quinto (01:47):

Sometimes creativity just involves asking simple questions to things that we do on an everyday basis. Processes that you may use or work, habits that you may use by asking, how can we do this to save time? How can we do this to save money? How can we do it with less people involved? And so if you take big things and break them down again into little things, and I think we talked about this in our episode on problem-solving, where you take the big concern and break it down into small concerns, you can truly then to become more creative on the bigger things because you're asking specific questions in your creativity and that is your vision. How do we make things cheaper? How do we do things more efficiently? How do we do it more effectively to get the ideas to help you to do that?

Lou Quinto (02:32):

And the next topic we're going to cover is what is innovation? And as I said earlier, sometimes people use them interchangeably, but innovation is actually a process to take an idea from creativity and implement it. And three degrees is of innovation are what we call incremental. And incremental usually is within the company where you take a process of policy, a product, and you make it new and improved by taking that, make something that exists new and improved. And the second type of innovation is what we call breakthrough innovation. And breakthrough innovation usually affects a marketplace or a demographic. I use iPod as an example. Apple took and came up with the iPod where they took technology that was already existing and what they did was they transformed it into a device that you could carry around music.

Lou Quinto (03:22):

So they took downloading music using MP3 technology, and then they created a device that you would be able to store it in and then listen to it later. And so that affected a marketplace. And then there's what we call transformational innovation. And transformational usually affects things on a worldwide basis where the ATM is truly transformed the business of banking. When it came to individual people banking, you didn't go to the teller, you didn't go to the bank, you just went to the ATM or for any of ocean watching in England cash point. You know, you went to the cashpoint and you went ahead and did that. So innovation. So yeah. So I think it's, it's interesting to

Craig P. Anderson (04:01):

Bring all those pieces to bear in a company. Right. So that's some of the things we tried to do and I can think of it a long time ago in the student loan industry that I came out of, you know early on it was very paper-based, you know, and it took forever. It took about eight weeks to process a loan. But what was really clever about it and one company came up with this very innovative product, it was an online, it was a computer-based product where you could key in the school, could key in all the information and then automatically transmit it back to the, to the company and get those loans processed and cut a lot of time out. Not only was it an innovation that bought a lot of time for or saved a lot of time for students to get the loans.

Craig P. Anderson (04:38):

The other piece of it is for the company who created the software, it actually helped them reduce their costs dramatically because now all the data entry was happening on the other side and that saved them money as well. So some of these are, they are kind of multiple iterate now iterations, but multiple impact points, right? So, so there's a lot of things that can come through innovation, but that started as we said in the creativity where somebody kind of brainstorm to figure out, all right, how can we make this faster? How can we improve a process? Then it's the execution piece more focused on it. All right, what is the innovation? How are we going to build those pieces? How are we going to build those platforms to speed this up and implement and implement them? Right? Yeah, exactly.

Lou Quinto (05:16):

Alright, and the third topic we're going to talk about is how do we create a culture that is innovative and creative and let's get rid of, okay, let's clear out an old office and put a ping pong table or foosball table in there that's not creating an innovative culture that way. In fact, most people probably won't go into that room because they're afraid their boss is going to come by and think that they're goofing off at work. And so a lot of times people who have done that have found out, well no one ever uses the creativity room and it's, there's a reason. So anyway, creating a culture,

Craig P. Anderson (05:50):

Well I think, you know, some of it is just baseline of bringing different skills and energies into your organization. So one of the things I do a lot with my clients is called core values index, where we kind of break people down into their different core energies. And two of those core energies. One is innovation, which is really that kind of ideation and coming up with new ideas and the creativity phase. And then there's the builder energy and everybody has a little bit of both, but it's usually the builder in the room that kind of comes to the points that all right, we've created, all right innovators, let's move on and let's kick in and let's act right. So it's the difference between the creativity piece and then the taking action. Because there are some people who can brainstorm all day. I'm one of them, right? I can spin up ideas all day long at some point. Either I have to kick it in or someone is kicking in for me. So I think it's kind of building the right people and getting a diversity of opinion or approaches around the room. And that's kind of a starting point is do I have all the right pieces around the table to help me both create ideas and execute?

Lou Quinto (06:42):

Yeah. Yeah. And there are some points obviously in creating culture. One is that you've got to start. Everybody is creative. So start at the bottom, go all the way to the top. Creativity just doesn't happen on the C level. It happens down at the bottom because these are the people that are actually dealing with our customers. They're dealing with the product, they're producing the product. They may have some ideas that kick in. And so the other thing too that I always tell people is that in a brainstorming session, if you want creativity, don't judge an idea in the same meeting that you created. You've got to go out and you've got to gather data and you've got to find out if an idea will work, don't kill it immediately. The other thing too is when it comes to creating is make failure an option a lot of times because we're, I know you smirked a little bit about that, but at the same time, I'm not saying go out and fail all the time, but in the process, tell, let employees know or yourself, if you're an entrepreneur that failure's okay because you can, you can learn from your failures.

Lou Quinto (07:41):

And there are a lot of great products that actually begin with a failure because someone had, you know, had the courage to implement something, fail and go back and say, okay, we didn't do this right. How can we do it? Because it definitely is something that can click.

Craig P. Anderson (07:57):

Yeah. Given my choice, I'd rather not pale, but yes, I understand that we fetishize failure. So at any rate but what I will say is to, and to your point is, you know, I used to stand with, with my team, especially with my sales team and say, you know, I don't have all the ideas. You guys have all the needs. You guys are out there living this every day. So what we really want to do is take your good ideas and promulgate them across, right? So there's a lot of trying to bring that culture to say, all right, let's find those great ideas that you guys have and let's implement them across where they work. So, so I think there's a lot of good pieces to that. So, yeah. So Lou, what are your key takeaways today? Key takeaways is obviously

Lou Quinto (08:31):

We, we live in an environment where we always want to be a leader in our industry, or we want to be upfront. And the only way to do that is to stop just providing what we've always provided. If you want to be competitive, you truly need to allow people to be creative and then you need to take that creative creativity. And you need to implement it with the innovation part of it. And again, start incremental worry about breakthrough or transformational, yet incremental innovation truly begins to start having an effect on that bottom line. And so be creative, innovative. It's only going to be beneficial for your company and your organization.

Craig P. Anderson (09:11):

Yeah, I think my key takeaway really comes back from just my experience leading divisions, leading companies is you've got to allow for that. You've got to create a culture that says, Hey, you know, it's like we're not the idea guys over here and you're the actors over there. It's, you know, we work better as a team. We have better results as a team. So really this whole idea of creativity and innovation is how do we take that from, from within the organization, build that up as a value to say, we want your ideas, we want you to help us figure out how to execute this so we can get the whole company moving forward. So I think for me it's really building that right culture that helps to drive that kind of innovation. Yeah.

Lou Quinto (09:45):

Which also then goes back to some of our previous episodes. Employee engagement. Yup. Okay. And collaboration, because that's all part of that, fostering that environment, that culture that you're going to have to be more creative and innovative. Absolutely. Very good. So if you like this video, go ahead and click on the like button, subscribe to Q and a on breakthrough leadership so that you know when the next episode is going to come across. And please share this with people that you work with, who you want to be creative, and you may feel you getting a little pushback, share this with them, and maybe it'll be a subtle hint that something they want to add to their list of things to did. So we appreciate you tuning in.

Craig P. Anderson (10:24):

My name is Lou Quinto and I'm Craig P. Anderson.