Professional web design, Cumbria, North LancashireYou can be creative without being Innovative, but you can't be innovative without being creative!
By definition an entrepreneur must be at least a little creative. Without an element of creativity new ideas do not flow and opportunities are not seen.
It may not be a totally new idea or concept that becomes the "innovation" from the entrepreneur but simply a new style or fashion, perhaps even retrospective pastiche brings re-invention. Think of our small business earlier when Bill Cubin created his museum, all of what he had or was later given and that which he brought to the market had been seen before, often many times, but not in the birth place of Stan Laurel. His idea to bring to the market a monument dedicated solely to the great comedic pair was the first novelty and the association with the town of one of the famous pairs' birth the other.
Although he was not taken too seriously back in the seventies when the idea came to him he went ahead and did it. Backing soon came from around the world including Laurel's relatives. So creativity has many faces, look for them.
The Artist uses creativity in its widest sense to produce statues or paintings unfortunately, the world of art appears to have high-jacked the word 'Creativity' and as a consequence (to the less artistic commercial sectors) creativity has become something ponsey and of little or no value to the "Bottom Line".
On the other hand, commerce and industry uses Applied Creativity (usually without knowing it) and this is focussed and bounded to produce "innovation". My late friend, Robert Campsie Muller argued that Applied Creativity, or as he called it, Masterful Creativity, is very powerful in the hands of an individual or group who understand the simple processes employed. But to the uninitiated, creativity can be a bottomless pit! In most cases argues Muller, it will become such if it is not bounded and hemmed in with some rules (the boundaries). (Muller 2000)
We have seen the results of opportunities identified and pursued
Bill Gates of Microsoft,
Richard Branson of Virgin,
Wayne Hemmingway of Red or Dead,
Trevor Bayliss inventor of the clockwork radio,
Alan Sugar of Amstrad
Anita Roddick of Body Shop
Martha Lane Fox of Lastminute.com
All have identified an opportunity and pursued it with vigour to build the empires or create the lifestyle they now have. Opportunities lie in all kinds of places. They can be other people's problems, a specific niche in the market, which as been identified as missing or poorly covered, or even an invention of someone else's, which has not been exploited. But rarely do they jump out and bite you, they have to be sought, so we must learn new techniques if we are to find them.
Invariably the entrepreneur has to know the market place he or she wishes to serve and it is often the knowledge of this sector that actually helps to create new ideas, either in that market place or another; for entrepreneurship can be about seeing what works in one market and adapting it to fulfil a need in another. The entrepreneur is always looking for ways to improve things, and the easiest place to start is usually with things that you know and understand. Sometime ago Anita Roddick brought a new concept of "earth friendliness" to her products and later, to reposition the organisations as caring, the concept that we should not "rip off" workers in the third world but pay a fair price for their labours and raw materials. Others have noticed niches in the market from studying users and competitors, finding out the things they do not offer and making them available.
The identification of opportunity requires research into the market and its needs; consequently even if no knowledge of a market existed in the beginning, a close scrutiny of a market, sector or segment can soon reward the diligent. Occasionally, an individual may have some kind of brainstorm or piece of luck (being in the right place at the right time) and just happen on an opportunity without knowing anything at all about the market. However, once the idea has taken root they have the choice of cashing in and making a quick buck and then doing the proverbial runner, or staying the course for the long term.
The former could be argued as relating to an opportunist and the latter the entrepreneur, although it could be argued that the "persistent" opportunist becomes an entrepreneur if he or she makes a habit of being in the right place at the right time.
An entrepreneur often has to manage those around him or her to achieve the step change in the market that they seek. Not all of our entrepreneurs above have 'owned' the skills needed to take their concepts to a successful conclusion. They have had to identify their own shortcomings and make sure that the team around them compensates for this. Hemingway, Branson and Gates have all been adept at this. A good entrepreneur knows intrinsically or learns quickly that to create a success requires the interdependence of skills and they will work hard to make sure that the members of the team not only work together, but also become interdependent. Maslow (1968) believed that the stages of personal development culminated in interdependence and it was when this occurred that learning and personal growth was maximised. So it is with the team put together by an entrepreneur, interdependence becomes a key factor and the entrepreneur understands how to manage it.
We have already made some points on the difference between entrepreneurs and risk takers. Any entrepreneur worth their salt will look at the risks involved in bringing new ideas or processes to the market. Once a risk has been identified something can be done to mitigate it, however, if the risk is ignored the chances of failure are increased sometimes beyond any acceptable level, but the risk taker may not know this, and let's face it - "Sod's Law" says that if anything can go wrong, it will.
Having assessed risk our entrepreneur will formulate a strategy to mitigate or remove the risk altogether. Good (and sometimes meticulous) planning will provide the strategy to get the project from where it is now to where it has to be; usually the project objectives and the strategy will be measured by goals, milestones and deliverables is set timescales. So many businesses work on a system of plan when it needs it or rely on their production planning software to filter out good practices and opportunities rather than specifically sitting down for an hour or so every week/month to plan for risks, growth of skills, sales, knowledge and profit and yet to do this would more than likely free up many hours which could be utilised on other things; the things you would like to do but can't find the time at the moment etc. We do not advocate that owner managers should be spending all their time planning, what we are saying is that if you spend some of your time making quality plans and monitoring events you will be more profitable, flexible and ready to adapt as markets demand, but more of this later.
This follows on from above where we covered interdependence. The ability to know when different skills and abilities are needed is paramount to the success of many projects and the ultimate success in melding the individual skill holders into an effective team. This may sometimes involve using skills from outside the "consortium" to pull things together or to generate specific knowledge or input for success.
A typical example of linking skills and knowledge would be seen in a University Spin Out, where Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is taken from the university and exploited by the entrepreneur and his or her company. Often a company may be formed to include members of the academic team who may have developed the original idea. In either case the entrepreneur needs to create a feeling and reality of the win/win scenario. No one wants to feel exploited or at risk from others who may have developed the current IPR, so specific and interlocking skills are needed to negotiate terms and conditions acceptable to all who become involved. An example of this would be building a house. There are many trade skills required to build a dwelling and all of these skills have to be brought to bear at the right time, this takes planning and an understanding of how the skills dovetail to produce the end result, so it is with any project or business which involves using more than one person.
