Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2015. Its framing of e-books hurting print books and the community manager as a newly created profession reflects 2015.
It is often said that creativity is something we all come with as standard in our brains. But the brain works like a muscle: the parts you don’t exercise waste away. In other words, we can all be creative as long as we develop the right attitude. And that attitude tends to show up when necessity bites.
Being creative isn’t easy at all. It takes work and imagination to force change or adapt to it. What is beyond dispute is that right now, professionals and companies alike have to be creative, or there is a high chance they will disappear off the map.
If you don’t know what to do, or what business idea you could bring to market, the first piece of advice is to start exercising that part of your brain. First, you have to motivate yourself and take action. Second, you should know that you will most likely have more failures than successes with your ideas.
See also: What is the perfect business or job for me? How to work out what to do
1. Read things you don’t usually read
To develop your creativity and spark that creative idea, you need to start reading about subjects very different from the ones you are used to, mix with other kinds of people and even study other cultures.
For example, if you’re an architect and you only read about architecture and your trade’s publications, you will rarely come across new ideas outside your profession. Now imagine you start reading about renewable energy, or spending time with home-automation experts. That could lead to ideas for a new kind of efficient architecture, where the goal is a smart home that is self-sufficient in energy thanks to automation.
This is what’s called “hybridising” concepts.
Some years ago, when I bought a magazine, it came with a free book called El arte de inventarse profesiones (“The art of inventing professions”). Since it was a gift and I had my own reading lined up, I didn’t get round to it until fairly recently, when I discovered that it has some fantastic concepts and ideas on how to create your own profession with a lot of creativity.
The book mentioned the McLean case from 1937
McLean was a truck driver who hauled cotton from one city to another in 1937. He noticed how he had to wait for hours while the goods were unloaded from a truck and moved onto a ship. McLean had an idea that would change the way goods are transported forever.
His idea was that goods could be loaded directly, without anyone having to touch the product or unload it by hand. His business idea was to invent the container for transporting goods, which gave rise to the company Sea-Land. Over the years, McLean became directly responsible for the fact that shipping containers are today the standard way to move goods, something that has undoubtedly made transport faster and easier.
More recently, we’ve seen many companies “hybridise” other concepts, such as shipping containers and housing: those containers are now used to build low-cost homes inside them. Both inventions were born out of creativity and solve a need. And they are still a mix of two very different concepts.
2. To be creative, you’ll have to kill an old concept
Being innovative or creative is something that scares many people, and companies above all, because often an innovative new business idea first has to kill the old one.
In fact, it is no cliché that a crisis is an opportunity: a crisis signals the change of a cycle, in which many concepts will die and the most creative people will end up creating others.
There’s an old saying: “We can’t control the wind, but we can control how we set the sails so the wind pushes us forward.”
For example, email is slowly killing traditional mail, and e-books are hurting paper books. The CD killed the cassette, the DVD killed VHS, and before long the convergence of tech products will end the need to carry music, files and films in physical formats. They will be fully digital. Is that good or bad? I don’t know, but that’s the way it is. As a business, you adapt or you die.
3. The SCAMPER technique for creative ideas
Sergio Bulat, the author of the book El arte de inventarse profesiones, talks about Fred Osborne, a creative at an advertising agency who developed the SCAMPER concept. The initials stand for:
Substitute: You can be creative by replacing one thing with another. For example, on top of everything above, film cameras and their developing process were replaced by digital cameras. And now many companies have innovated backwards, offering to print your digital photos on paper in all kinds of formats.
Combine: Mix concepts that aren’t normally mixed. Besides the shipping-container home, we have all seen how coaches have multiplied. For the first time, self-help and psychology have become part of the business world with the creation of “executive coaches”. What’s more, Sergio Bulat is proud of having combined two concepts into a new profession that he practised for a long time: the “literary coach”.
Adapt: Adapt your knowledge to a completely different field. To give one example, many former US military personnel, when they leave the army, go on to teach people how to succeed in their careers, and even teach business owners to win their business wars, giving them military lessons adapted to the business world.
See also: 7 lessons for success from William H. McRaven, the SEAL commander who hunted down Bin Laden
Modify: Sometimes it’s just a matter of taking an old idea and improving it. Mobile phones are a good example here, as are the constant improvements made in tech to win the battle against the competition. It’s a matter of asking yourself: “What can I change or modify in this thing to make it better?”
Put to other uses: Ask yourself what else something could be used for. Take the famous board game Monopoly, which was born, like so many others, for fun. But someone had the idea that it’s also a good game for teaching business and finance concepts. Naturally, other entrepreneurs have had the idea of creating their own board games focused on learning a specific subject, mixing two concepts: fun and learning.
Eliminate: Ask yourself: what can we do without in this new idea or adaptation?
Reformulate: Take nothing for granted. Take a thing or concept apart and build it again.
Many of today’s jobs as we know them will tend to disappear, so we’ll see how creativity gives rise to new businesses and professions. We probably haven’t seen anything yet.
In the same way that a very profitable profession and business, the community manager, came out of nowhere, we’ll see all kinds of new professions. And you could be the next one to create a new concept or product, or to have a new idea that destroys an old one. We all have that ability, although not all of us have trained it equally.
Further reading
Featured image: Maersk Line, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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