“There are two types of creativity: The creativity of making zero to one, and the creativity of making one to a thousand,” noted Kazuhiko Nishi, a pioneering software entrepreneur who joined Microsoft in its early days and later became a leader of the ASCII Corporation. Nishi is right that in business, we can clearly distinguish various levels of creativity that differ in nature and their innovation focus. I identified five different levels of creativity that I’m going to introduce to you now.
Creativity at level 1: Making minus two to minus one
Imagine you have to maneuver a giant vehicle, e.g., a bucket-wheel excavator. Although it hardly moves at all — if it’s not sliding back, this bulky, heavy, rigid vehicle burns lots of fuel, oil and money just to keep it running.
Creativity of making minus two to minus one focuses on ideas to save costs and resources, to help bulky organizations become leaner, meaner and more agile again, to simplify processes and operational structures, and to raise organizational efficiencies. At this entry level of creativity, it’s rather easy to come up with ideas for such incremental improvements. Everyone within an organization can contribute. And guess what? Your competitors can easily come up with such simple, practical and rather operational ideas, too. As such, level one creativity won’t set your firm apart from your competitors; it just raises your odds of survival in a fast-changing world, allowing you to put a few coins into your corporate piggy bank.
Creativity at level 2: Making zero to one
Let’s trade your giant vehicle for a car that clearly moves you forward. Typically, you have more than just one gear, allowing you to switch gears and move forward at higher speeds.
Making zero to one is the second level of creativity. Here you create ideas for meaningful, new and original value offerings for your customers. You may do this through product innovation, service innovation, solution design, and customer experience design, whereby you shift up gears and gain momentum as you move toward the more advanced innovation types. This is because profit margins tend to increase as we move up from product innovation to customer experience design due to a higher perception of value.
Creativity at level 3: Making one to two
Now you swap your plain-geared car with a well-designed and -branded sports car. It has a button that activates a turbo booster that doubles your acceleration in each gear. What a joy to see the envious looks of other car drivers when you pass by! What a joy to see their looks of frustration when the turbo kicks in and you speed off!
Creativity on the third level magnifies your value offering through cool marketing and design ideas, such as a clever promotional campaign, sleek packaging, an outstanding brand and an inspirational corporate image. Just like hitting a “turbo drive” button accelerates your car at each gear, so do ideas for value magnification amplify the perception of value in the eyes of your customers, thus allowing you to charge higher prices and often at least double your profit margin.
Creativity at level 4: Making one to a thousand
Do you start feeling bored driving in vehicles confined to the ground? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sit in a vehicle that flies above all others? To own and control the empty space in the air with a new flying vehicle?
On the fourth level of creativity, you look for ideas that multiply your value: For example, you don’t patronize only one group of customers, but serve multiple groups; you don’t sell your value offerings only in one country, but in almost all countries; you don’t use only one channel but multiple channels. Creativity of making one to a thousand gives you a giant lever to lift your business into the sky and beyond your competitors. But you need to create ideas for entire new channels, new networks, new partnerships, and new business models. Level four ideas are more conceptual, technical and quantitative in nature — and ideally lead to one integrated new platform that you control and that is the only pathway to gain access to your value offering.
Creativity at level 5: Making minus two to a thousand
Now suppose you dared to mentally depart from all existing vehicles on the market. You anticipate and imagine how transportation will transform in the future. You envision a future where every home has virtual reality rooms and 3D-printers (both of which are likely to lower the need for mobility and transportation) or —in a more distant future— people enjoy teleportation (just like in Star Trek, where Captain Kirk called Scotty to “beam me up”).
If you’re a member of a visionary leadership team that is bold and brave enough to create a new future for a stagnating corporation, then you’re ready for the peak level of creativity: making minus two to a thousand. In a true strategy innovation project, you generate ideas on how to make your company become a leader in an emerging market space. Thereby, you play on all lower levels of creativity, and integrate all ideas into one strategic roadmap for your future: You create ideas for truly creative value offerings marketed under an avant-garde brand using hip promotional and image campaigns and tied into a state-of-the-art delivery platform (which unifies channel partners, networks, modern payment options and business models). At the same time, you structure operations and processes of your new business unit in a lean, simple and resource-effective way to also keep a cost advantage over the inevitable followers.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2015. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 26 November 2015.