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Creativity

Adaptation has become the only solution to survival when faced with evolving markets and demands in a constantly changing reality.

This continual adaptation regularly encounters unfamiliar situations. Unfamiliar within the team, the company, and sometimes even within the wider context of an entire business sector.

You have to come up with solutions that are out of the ordinary, responses that defy the norm, you have to be creative.

As a result of numerous research studies, it seems that what creativity and innovation have in common is novelty and usefulness.

And it is precisely in this balance between novelty and utility that creativity and innovation are distinguished.

Here are a few examples.

During my studies in industrial design, we came into contact with a well-known company in the chemical sector. They had developed a plastic material that was brittle like glass but became incredibly elastic when held in the hand and warmed to body temperature. The problem was that they had yet to find an outlet for their product. It was a new and original material, but it had no use. There was nothing innovative about it.

Take the example of the computer mouse.

Trackballs (which, after all, are just upside-down mice) were patented as early as the 40s, and the mouse as we know it today was patented in the 60s by Douglas Engelbart. By 1968, a Telefunken server already had a mouse as an option. In 1973, Xerox's Alto appeared with a mouse-based graphical interface. By the end of the 70s, the idea of integrating a mouse into a computer was no longer science fiction. However, a major company had to be bold enough to make it a major feature, rather than just an expensive and impractical option. And that company was Apple.1

The computer mouse is a creation that has facilitated a few companies' work. But until Steve Jobs made it available to everyone as an integral part of ergonomics, the mouse was not an innovation.

I could also talk about the artistic movement of Impressionism, or Dadaism, or the construction techniques of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Creativity comes from originality. Innovation comes from industrialization.

Within the teams, the important thing is to respond to new problems without worrying about how their creations will be used outside the team.

Creativity is what teams need to meet the challenges they face.