The 9 Biggest Myths About Creativity You Should Never Believe

Innovation is the organizational function of introducing new, useful, and feasible products, services, processes, or business models by an organization. Creativity is the individual’s (or team of individuals’) cognitive ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, and create meaningful and original ideas.

Innovation = entrepreneurship and startups

Innovation cannot be achieved by mature, large companies. Only by startups.

• The myth acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy and deters large companies from attempting to innovate like startups. Reality
• Some of the top innovative companies are mature and large

Innovation initiatives need to be implemented throughout the entire organization

Recent regulations impose more strict scrutiny on companies and force the implementation of more stringent internal processes

• You need to know where your creative core needs to be, and release those people from processes that stifle creativity
• Autonomy and freedom from processes and bureaucracy belong in some areas of the company

You were either born creative or not

Creativity cannot be learned or exercised

• It can be affected by your practices
• How you expose yourself to old ideas
• Procrastinate to let them incubate
• Trigger the combination of those ideas into new ones
• Relax to let it happen

Financial incentives increase creativity

Not only do financial incentives fail to increase creativity, experiments show that they actually reduce it

• Financial incentives have been proven to increase productivity on simple and repetitive tasks.
• Complex tasks, especially the creation of new ideas, are motivated intrinsically within the task itself.

There is nothing you can do to increase innovation organically in your company

Just as individuals can increase their creativity levels, so can companies

• Innovation is the implementation of individual (and team) creative ideas
• An organization has three main degrees of freedom to increase creativity
• Hire more creative people
• Create a climate that motivates those individuals (and teams) to be more creative
• Institute a mechanism of self-selection of creative ideas to implement them

Innovation requires significant resources and funding

The more R&D dollars you spend, the more innovative your company will be

• There is no evidence that the amount of money spent on research yields better creativity
• Beyond a certain amount of resources, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you can have too many resources that will make you think less

You need to drive innovation

Innovation will not happen by itself. You, the executive, need to be the driving force behind innovation.

• You cannot mandate it, but you can let employees know that trying things and failing is acceptable, as long as they learn from it. You can promote behaviors that increase creativity and discourage and eliminate the behaviors that discourage it.

You need to build an innovation space and allocate time for creativity

Innovation cannot happen while an employee is doing their “day job” in an office

• Create an innovation lab and put employees there to be innovative
• You cannot control where and when ideas will happen, you can only create an environment in which employees will become more creative

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