Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2022 - 17

The global pandemic has shifted how
work is done across every sector.
Some organizations have successfully
pivoted, others have closed, and
others have even hit new heights in
profitability and growth.
We know that after a difficult period
of history, society tends to come back
stronger, leaning into a burst of creativity
and innovation. After the plague came
the Renaissance and after the Spanish
Flu came the Roaring '20s. But the
organizations that
thrived during the
pandemic didn't wait. They adopted
an entrepreneurial mindset and used
that difficult time to spark innovation.
They challenged old assumptions about
how and where work gets done. And
many accomplished a decade of digital
transformation in just a few months.
Harvard Business Review found a similar
pattern after the Great Recession: 17%
of companies died, while 9% thrived,
again with the differentiator being
whether they used the stressful period
for innovation.
Preparing your organization for any
future, the planned vision and the
unexpected detour, requires you
to create a culture of creativity and
innovation - one where your people
have the skills to do both well and also
feel safe enough to try new things.
CREATIVITY AND
INNOVATION ARE DIFFERENT
- YOU NEED BOTH.
Creativity and innovation are different
neurologically and in practice. In
practice, creativity is unleashing the
potential of the mind to conceive new
ideas. It includes flashes of insight or
" Aha! moments " that let us see things
differently.
Innovation, on the
other
hand, is the work required to make an
idea viable and includes a process, like
design thinking. Creativity is coming up
with an idea, while innovation capitalizes
on that idea.
Creativity
and
innovation
go
handin-hand,
and both are important for
businesses to survive both bad times
and good (see Figure 1). Creativity is the
funnel to innovation. It needs to come
first because creativity allows you to
brainstorm new ways of thinking and
doing - it unleashes the potential of the
mind to conceive new ideas. Innovation
is the work required to make that idea
viable so you can take it to market.
Figure 1. Understanding Creativity and Innovation
CREATIVITY
Creativity is unleashing the potential
of the mind to conceive new ideas.
Those concepts could manifest themselves in any
number of ways, but most often, they become
something we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste.
However, creative ideas can also be thought
experiments within the mind.
The " Aha! moment " ; flashes of insight.
Coming up with an idea.
Spending money to generate ideas.
© Britt Andreatta
TRAINING INDUSTRY MAGAZINE - SUMMER 2022 I WWW.TRAININGINDUSTRY.COM/MAGAZINE
| 17
INNOVATION
Innovation is the work required to make an idea
viable. It's also about introducing change into
relatively stable systems.
By identifying an unmet need, an organization
can use innovation to apply its creative resources
to design an appropriate solution and
reap a return on its investment.
A process, like design thinking.
Capitalizing on an idea.
Spending ideas to generate money.
Creativity and innovation go handin-hand,
and both are important
for businesses to survive.

https://trainingindustry.com/wiki/content-development/design-thinking/ https://www.inc.com/amrita-khalid/tech-trends-forecast-future-amy-webb.html https://www.inc.com/amrita-khalid/tech-trends-forecast-future-amy-webb.html https://hbr.org/2010/03/roaring-out-of-recession https://www.trainingindustry.com/magazine

Training Industry Magazine - Summer 2022

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