Module 2 Focus:

● 2.1 Outline the nature of creativity.

● 2.2 Outline the four steps of the creative process model.
● 2.3 Outline the components of creativity, use a series of creativity techniques, and
identify factors influencing creativity.
● 2.4 Outline the relationship between creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.
● 2.5 Outline the steps for screening opportunities.
● 2.6 Outline the nature and purpose of critical thinking.
● 2.7 Outline the use of critical thinking in an enterprise.

2.2 What is creativity?

Module LO: 2.1 Outline the nature of creativity.

- Creativity is the ability to use imagination or original ideas to create something

- In business, this can be defined as the production of new and useful ideas.
- To ensure they are useful, they need to fulfill a need in the marketplace and generate profit.
- For the ideas to be successful, innovative companies systematically encourage the
development of these ideas.
- Innovation in business is the implementation of these ideas into a product, process or
service.

THE NATURE OF CREATIVITY

Creativity involves:
Association between problems or ideas
- Ability to produce work that is both novel and useful.
- This allows the individual to have the ability to make connections across ‘seemingly
unrelated questions, problems or ideas’.
- Purposive activity with one target in mind

Incremental and Radical ideas

- Breaking through radical new ideas and new ways of framing the problem and new
directions for solving it.
- Creativity is also hard work, and refining those breakthrough ideas, debugging and problem
solving.
- The pattern of innovation is one of occasional flashes of inspiration followed by long
periods of incremental improvement around those breakthrough ideas. Creativity matters
throughout this process.

Divergent (explore) and Convergent (focus) thinking

- Convergent thinking is about focus, homing in on a single ‘best’ answer, while divergent
thinking is about making associations, often exploring round the edges of a problem. While
there are some examples of problems which have a single ‘right’ answer and need a
convergent approach, most require a mixture of the two thinking skills. We need divergent
thinking to open them up, explore their dimensions and create new associations; and we
 need convergent thinking to focus, refine and improve the most useful solution for a
particular context.

Left and Right brain thinking

- Left hemisphere is particularly associated with activities like language and calculation.
While our ‘left brain’ seems linked to what we might call ‘logical’ processing, the role of the
‘right brain’ was, for a long time, much less well understood. Gradually it became clear that
it is involved in associations, patterns and emotional links; people with damage to the right
hemisphere are often incapable of understanding humour or of feeling moved by painting
or music. Our ability to think in metaphors and to visualise and imagine in novel ways is
strongly linked to activity on this side of the brain.
- It’s not a case of ‘creativity = right brain thinking’ but rather that we need to recognise that
both hemispheres are involved and they play different roles. This has important
implications for developing the skills of creative thinking, as we’ll see later, because we
need to find ways to enable this interconnection between the two.
Pattern Recognition

- Creativity is particularly about patterns and our ability to see these. In its simplest form if
we see a pattern, which we recognise, we have access to solutions which worked in the past
and which we can apply again.
- But sometimes it is a case of recognising a similarity between a new problem and
something like it which we have seen before.
- Sometimes it is about finding a new pattern which makes sense. One of the challenges in
creativity is that it sometimes involves breaking rules, changing perspectives, seeing things
differently. And this can set up tensions between the person coming up with this new way of
seeing and the rest of the world, who still have the old view.

Individual and group creativity

- So far we have been talking about individual creativity but it is also important to recognise
the power of interaction with others. We are all different in personality, experience and
approach, and these differences mean we see problems and solutions from different
perspectives. Combining our approaches, sparking ideas off each other and building on
shared insights are all-powerful ways of amplifying creativity. The old proverb that ‘two
heads are better than one’ is often true; think of the many successful creative partnerships
in the world of music or theatre, for example.

2.3 Creativity as a process: The four steps of the creative process

Module LO: 2.2 Outline the four steps of the creative process model.

Recognition/Preparation
- Creativity starts with recognising we have a problem or puzzle to solve and then exploring
its dimensions. Working out the real problem, the underlying issue, is an important skill in
arriving at a solution which works. Redefining and reframing are key skills here, being able
to see the wood for the trees, the underlying pattern of the core problem.

Incubation
- Sometimes redefining and exploring the problem is enough to lead to a solution — but very
often we are left with a problem and no obvious answer. Wrestling with it, pulling it into
different shapes and trying to force fit it to something we’ve seen before simply doesn’t
work. This is where we need to let go with our conscious minds and allow the brain some
time to play around, to incubate. It needs to allow new connections to be made, and typical
ways of helping this include relaxing, doing something different, going for a walk, sleeping
on the problem, etc. What’s going on underneath is a fascinating process of association and
connecting in ways which may appear to be illogical. Think about your dreams and the
amazing and unlikely events which take place in them; connections are established between
random elements which simply wouldn’t normally be linked. This is an important part of
the unconscious creative process and one of the powerful ways of supporting this stage is to
give the brain some help in making new connections.
- This also links with our earlier discussion of divergent and convergent thinking; divergence
is very much about finding new links and connections. To help with this we need to find
ways to enable the right hemisphere of the brain to play a more active role, to shut down
temporarily the left brain with its logic and systematic approach and allow for new patterns
and associations to emerge.
Insight
- It’s not just the awareness of a solution; there is often a strong emotional charge, a deeps
sense of the answer, a certainty
- Techniques like brainstorming make much of the act of writing down ideas, and variations
on the theme use pictures and sketches to capture the insights. Making ‘sculptures’ out of
everyday items to represent elements in a different way and make this available to others is
another route. Within the field of design methods, many powerful tools and techniques are
based on the idea of helping people articulate what they can’t fully express — allowing for
‘visualising the invisible’.

Validation
- This is the stage at which the idea, the core insight, becomes refined and developed. It
involves trying the idea out — prototyping — and using feedback from that to adapt and
develop it. For example, the ‘lean start-up’ methodology for new venture entrepreneurs
places strong emphasis on the idea of designing experiments around a ‘minimum viable
product’ (MVP). The idea is to use the MVP as a probe, a prototype around which we can
gather information to help refine and focus the initial insight. Central to the approach is the
idea of the ‘pivot’ — not changing direction completely but rotating around the core idea to
find the most suitable configuration which works.
- Prototyping can be done in various ways and forms the core of design methods aimed at
bringing new ideas into widespread use. A key point here is that this represents the end of
one cycle and the beginning of the next. As we saw earlier, creativity is a process of
alternately opening up and closing in on the core solution. By sharing the original idea we
can explore its different dimensions from many perspectives and open up the idea for
further development.

2.4 The three components of creativity

CREATIVITY THINKING SKILLS
Creative thinking is a way that people approach problems and solutions. This depends strongly on
the individual's personality, as well as how a person thinks or works. People are more creative if
they feel comfortable disagreeing with others.
Creativity does not only consist of creative thinking—this is only one part of creativity.
Knowledge and motivation are two other important elements.

KNOWLEDGE
'Knowledge' encompasses everything a person knows and can do (expertise). This form of
knowledge can be acquired in different ways:

● Through formal education.

● Through practical experience.
 ● Through interaction with other people.
MOTIVATION
The psychological definition of motivation is a drive or an inner force that compels you towards
some action. In this unit you will look at motivation as one of two types:

● Intrinsic motivation means that a person is motivated internally. Your intrinsic

motivation for completing a university degree may be to challenge and improve
yourself.
● Extrinsic motivation means that a person is motivated because of external rewards.
You might be doing a university degree because you will get a job with an associated
high income.

Students who are intrinsically motivated tend to do a lot better in their studies than students who
are extrinsically motivated. When it comes to creativity, a mixture of both is required.

Module LO: 2.3 Outline the components of creativity, use a series of creativity techniques, and
identify factors influencing creativity.
CREATIVITY TECHNIQUES

Technique Description

Problem reversal The action of viewing a problem from an

opposite angle

Forced Analogy The action of making an association between

two unlike things to obtain new insights

Attribute listing The identification and listing of all major

characteristics of a product, object or data

Mind Maps A visual method of mapping information to

stimulate generation and analysis of it

Brainstorming A conference technique by which a group tries

to find a specific solution for a specific problem
by amassing spontaneous ideas.

2.5 Linking Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship

WALLAS MODEL OF CREATIVITY
Module LO: 2.4 Outline the relationship between creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.
KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT DURING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS
There are three stages within the entrepreneurial process:

● Creativity: knowledge is present in a very raw form.

● Innovation: knowledge is further refined and the initial idea should pass the ‘feasibility
test’.
● Entrepreneurship: knowledge is embedded in the product or service sold.
What all three stages (creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship) have in common is knowledge
development.
DEVELOPING AND DISSEMINATING KNOWLEDGE THROUGH SOCIAL NETWORKS
Social networks are the catalyst for the development and dissemination of knowledge both for
emerging and established organisations. Networks impact on the social, emotional and material
support available to entrepreneurs. Three features of social networks are:

● diversity
● affective strength
● structural equivalence.
FROM CREATIVITY TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP: SCREENING OPPORTUNITIES
The creativity-innovation-entrepreneurship process essentially entails identifying and evaluating
opportunities. During this process, business ideas will be assessed to determine whether they
represent an entrepreneurial opportunity—i.e. whether sustainable value and wealth can be
created.
THREE CRITICAL ISSUES TO CONSIDER WHEN SCREENING OPPORTUNITIES
2.6 What is critical thinking?

Module LO: 2.6 Outline the nature and purpose of critical thinking.
- Critical thinking is essential to ask the right questions and support your opinions with
logically connected ideas, arguments and evidence. It is also something you already use in
everyday life.

2.7 Using critical thinking in an enterprise

Module LO: 2.7 Outline the use of critical thinking in an enterprise.