Learn about creativity from individual and organisational perspectives, and how to create and lead transformative change.
Harnessing Your Creative Potential
This article is a part of series that explores creativity as part of the Creative Leap: Creativity as a Competitive Advantage in Business co-research project.
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Creativity is not just a personal skill. It is a powerful driver of business competitiveness, a tool for tackling societal challenges, and a source of personal fulfillment.With creativity, we produce innovations, find better ways of working, and experience a deeper sense of purpose.
Creativity emerges from individuals, teams, and organisations. Anyone can train and enhance their creativity. But there is a catch: creativity doesn鈥檛 just happen on its own. Like any skill, it needs attention, practice, and support to flourish.
What makes creativity thrive? Research identifies five core factors that empower individuals and businesses to generate, explore, and execute innovative ideas: creative identity, curiosity, drive, insightfulness, and confidence. Understanding and supporting these five factors can help unlock potential in yourself, at work or wherever you are.
Creative Identity
Creative identity forms the foundation of our creative attitudes and behaviours. If a person doesn鈥檛 perceive themselves as creative, he or she is less likely to engage in creative practices. Building a strong creative identity helps us to use creativity as a tool in problem-solving, idea generation and adapting to change allowing us to approach challenges with originality and resilience. Although behaving creatively can sometimes feel uncomfortable, especially if it鈥檚 new to you, it can bring a deeper sense of meaning to life.
Supporting Creative Identity
Factors like time, stress, and a lack of a supportive environment can negatively impact our sense of creativity. To identify what might be interfering with your creative identity, think if you often operate on autopilot due to stress or busy schedules. Reflect on moments when you last felt genuinely creative. What was the environment like? Were you alone or with others? Was it loud or quiet? What time of day was it? Reflecting on these questions can help you uncover the settings in which your creativity thrives, allowing you to enhance your creative identity.
In addition, surrounding yourself with people who encourage your creative thinking and support your self-esteem can nurture a sense of creativity.
Curiosity
Curiosity is the willingness to seek out the new or unusual, a blend of feeling and behaviour that drives us to explore and pursue new paths. It is the driving force behind human development. It naturally enhances our creativity, whilst also adding to our feelings of purpose and hope. When we engage our curiosity, we utilise our abilities holistically, embracing new ideas, situations, and behaviours that elevate our own potential to uncover truly unique, useful, and innovative solutions. Curiosity plays a crucial role in our creative potential, helping us to learn and seek answers to the challenges we encounter.
Supporting Curiosity
What stands on the way of curiosity, and also creativity, is often the fear of the unknown or failure, perfectionism and performance pressure. To spark curiosity, nurture your sense of exploration. Curiosity thrives on wondering and questioning so start easy with familiar topics or activities that you already enjoy and slowly introduce new ideas.鈥疎mphasize that exploring new ideas or learning isn鈥檛 about getting things 鈥渞ight鈥 but about discovery.
Highly curious individuals, on the other hand, may struggle with cognitive overload and lack of focus. To support curiosity, try organizing ideas with visual mind maps to reduce cognitive load. Focus on a few key areas that truly spark your curiosity, allowing for deeper engagement without mental fatigue.
If curiosity comes naturally to you, encourage curiosity in others bysharing your interests and inviting them to join you in exploring new ideas. Some people may prefer hands-on experiences over traditional methods, making it important to encourage different learning approaches. Together, curiosity can become a shared journey, sparking growth, creativity, and new perspectives.
Drive
Drive is the force that motivates us to act, learn, and grow. It provides purpose and fuels self-motivation pushing us to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. People who are positively driven believe they can shape their circumstances rather than passively adapt. Drive is therefore deeply linked to well-being and quality of life, providing the motivation to achieve our goals and pursue meaningful progress.
Supporting Drive
Drive can weaken due to stress, lack of recovery, or repetitive tasks that drain motivation. To sustain and revive your drive, reflect on what makes your work and tasks meaningful. When tasks align with your core values and inspire you, they energise rather than drain. Meaningful motivation pushes you to challenge yourself, exceed limits, and find joy in progress.
Setting clear, achievable goals is another powerful way to keep your momentum. Tangible milestones provide a sense of accomplishment and renew your energy. Tracking progress not only helps you stay focused but also reinforces your purpose, motivating you to push forward. Equally important is self-care. Managing stress and prioritizing rest sustain energy and productivity.
By maintaining a clear sense of purpose, monitoring progress, and taking time for yourself you can strengthen your inner drive to stay focused and achieve your goals.
Insightfulness
Insightfulness is an activity where a person deepens their own thinking through experimenting, knowledge seeking and finding relationships where they didn鈥檛 exist before. It directs us to question our ways of viewing, thinking, and explaining the world. It thus encourages us to build a deeper understanding of the world and explore different perspectives, thinking patterns and mental models. Through insightfulness we can incorporate both the big picture and the details into a clearer cognitive image.
Supporting Insightfulness
The interferences with insightfulness include lack of time, energy and stimuli. To strengthen insightfulness, start by making time for yourself and for focused work. Give yourself the mental space to reflect, analyse, and develop ideas without distractions. Sharpen your focus by questioning and rephrasing questions to gain fresh perspectives.
Thinking grows when shared! Learn to share and express your ideas and take action on them鈥攊nvite others to contribute and build on your concepts. Collaboration not only refines your thinking but also sparks fresh perspectives. In addition to sharing and collaboration, you can enhance your insightfulness by engaging with diverse topics and reading materials beyond your usual interests.
By dedicating time to focus and question, sharing ideas openly, and exploring beyond your comfort zone, you can unlock more innovative, insightful thinking.
Confidence
Confidence is the trust we have in ourselves, the courage to move forward and process ideas and perspectives even when outcomes are uncertain. Confidence allows us to persevere despite setbacks, uncertainty, anxiety, resistance from others, or even social isolation. This dynamic balance between self-trust, risk tolerance, and social conformity shapes how confidence emerges in different contexts. Confident people tend to generally trust their abilities while a lack of confidence makes it difficult to engage deeply and immersion in tasks or challenges.
Supporting Confidence
Uncertainty and fear of mistakes may reduce confidence, especially when there is a risk involved. Building confidence starts with identifying areas where you feel self-assured and where you struggle. By focusing on your strengths, it becomes easier to tackle uncertainty and identify areas where you already tolerate discomfort and feel confident. From there, you can intentionally take steps to engage with calculated risks. The more you accept risk and do mental practice to prepare yourself for those situations, the less intimidating discomfort and risk will become for you. Visualization exercises, such as imagining the worst-case scenario and exploring how it might unfold, can help you assess its impact realistically. Reflecting on what that makes you feel insecure can also provide valuable insights.
Success builds courage, so embrace progress. Remember, taking risks and learning from failure is far more rewarding and beneficial for our learning than avoiding opportunities due to fear. Confidence grows through action鈥攕tart today!
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Creative Leap: Creativity as a competitive advantage in business
鈥楥reative Leap: Creativity as a competitive advantage in business鈥 is a co-research project funded by Business Finland and Next Generation EU. It researches how creativity can be measured and managed and if creative methods and approaches correlate with financial success. It aims to create a framework to support the impact of individual and organizational creativity within companies in Finland and to model the financial impact of creativity.
Further Information:
The Aesthetics and Playfulness of Creativity 鈥 An Overlooked Area in Business
For a long time, aesthetics has been a fairly overlooked aspect in the fields of organizational and business creativity. Aesthetics play a part in companies that allow space for 鈥榗reative experimentation鈥.