The Creativity Crisis? What Creativity Crisis? - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

The most important thing to understand about America's "crisis of creativity" is that there isn't one. The notion that American business creativity is either at risk or in decline is laughable. Arguments that "Yankee ingenuity" is ebbing into oxymoron are ludicrous. They invite ridicule. So here it comes.

Yes, America's economy is awful. But so what? Hard times haven't nicked, dented or damaged this country's creative core competence. To the contrary, they've made more people more interested in being more creative. Spend serious time at research university labs. Or sit in on 10K business plan competitions. Or wander through Silicon Valley incubators and Texas industrial parks. Or listen to top-tier venture capitalists. You'll be impressed. There's no shortage of creativity and ingenuity here.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests the only measurable "creativity crisis" America faces is an embarrassment of riches. We're spoiled for choice.

America has a creativity glut. Over two decades, I've not heard a single venture capitalist suggest any perceptible decline in the creative quality and content of the business proposals they see. If anything, their innovation buffet has expanded. Aspiring pundits shouldn't confuse macroeconomic malaise with creative constipation.

From software to telecommunications to bioinformatics to ecotech to health care, transforming novel concepts to prototype, demo or beta version has never been faster and cheaper. The pervasive rise of interoperability further assures a growing reservoir of creative options. The costs and complexity of creatively linking seeming disparate technical disciplines — microbiology and materials science, behavioral finance and computational fluid dynamics, biomedical engineering and traffic analysis — to solve problems are shrinking. These new economics of creative expression have demolished traditional barriers of entry to early-stage innovation.

These innovation infrastructures to support creative interaction have never been more accessible or more robust. They effectively invite innovators to take a chance. Just as important, individuals and institutions increasingly recognize that interdisciplinary collaboration, not just personal genius, is essential to breakthrough. Digital media now facilitate mass collaborations between thousands with the same ease and fluency that intimate collaborators — Watson & Crick, the Wright brothers, Braque & Picasso, the Curies — who depended on physical media would envy.

This point is vital: genuine creativity isn't about ideas. It's about translating ideas into ingenious products, services and solutions. Ideas are the seeds, not the substance, of creativity. Getting them to take root is easier than it's ever been.

That's why cover stories declaring creativity droughts in America feel so faux. Sure, they're provocative. But the underlying science is psuedo; the overarching solutions are silly.

Wild speculation trumps sober insight. Even if one believes, for example, that a standardized creativity test suggests American students have become less creative (I don't), it begs the question of whether such tests fairly capture the creativity that matters to markets. After all, this test was explicitly designed to measure individual prowess. There's zero assessment of the collaborative creativity and temperament. The test, in other words, inherently ignores the most powerful interpersonal dynamic now shaping contemporary corporate innovation. (Am I biased because I wrote a book about creative collaboration? Sure. Just the way most creativity research is biased by its overwhelming focus on individual psychology.)

But it's the solutions to America's creativity quotient shortfall that beggar belief. What's the recommendation for boosting America's impending underperformance? Why, put creativity classes in school curricula! Forgive me my Summerhill flashback. The same public schools producing students who underperform on standardized tests in math, science, writing and reading comprehension should be performing CPR — Creative Process Recovery — on America's schoolchildren? That doesn't even rise to the level of nonsense. Schools that can't effectively teach reading, writing and arithmetic should now champion TRIZ, de Bono and Synectics? Please. America will truly have a "creativity crisis" when "creativity" becomes a required high school course.

My bet is that the overwhelming majority of today's children and adolescents will be getting all kinds of creative stimulation and challenge from the video-games they play and the social networks they manage via their digital devices. Needless to say, traditional tests of convergent/divergent creative thinking probably aren't well-suited for capturing these new genres and modes of creative development. Then again, any serious review of the creativity research literature and the history of creativity suggests that the very definition of creativity has evolved in rather creative ways. Particularly in business innovation, creativity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Your creative solution may be my cliche. Let's not forget that "creative" accounting is not intended as a compliment.

Which is why the greatest misconceptions around creativity crises revolve around context. If you believe in markets (as I do), then the supply of creativity overwhelmingly depends on its demand. Only experts and elitists believe that creativity is determined by creators. In markets, creativity — and its value — is determined by consumers. The most creative industries such as fashion, music, video-games, software, and animated movies tend to have audiences and customers that think of themselves as creative. Customer openness to creativity — however defined — powerfully influences creative supply.

Many wealthy people, for example, find Damien Hirst a brilliantly creative artist whose work is worth the millions they pay for it. Respectfully, I think they're idiots. Nevertheless, The Hirst brand, not unlike Picasso or Pixar, is deemed creative. Look at his skillfully dismembered formaldehyde shark or diamond skull and draw your own conclusions. Ask yourself: What does Hirst's success say about creativity?

My point is not to mock Hirst's art but to use its undeniable success to interject a different strand into the creativity crisis conversation. That is, who gets to define what creativity means in our businesses and industries? Academics? Our R&D people? Our sales folks? The CEO? Industry analysts? Competitors? Entrepreneurs? Our best customers? Our smartest customers? Our typical customers?

My view is that creativity — like any meaningful exchange of value — is not declared but negotiated. The most important innovation conversations have evolved and revolve around what kinds of people, approaches and solutions are creative. The essential difference between those conversations today and even a decade ago is that we have more ways, more tools and technologies to express ourselves both as individuals and as collaborative teams. So do our customers and clients.

What do you think is creative? Do you think there is a creativity crisis? More importantly, does your organization have healthy arguments about what creativity actually means to you and your customers?