Get Creative For More Profit
At some stage the product or service that launched a company will need to be enhanced or supplemented with other solutions to keep customers engaged. This is where creativity can help entrepreneurs go above and beyond their initial vision.
“Creative thinking is a huge part of good business acumen, without which your business could just go into the stagnation mode,” say experts from eonetwork.org in their blog post, “Reasons Why it is Important for Entrepreneurs to be Creative.”
Fresh Eyes
Look at your business and products or services with fresh eyes. For example, creativity may be about doing more with less. Can you streamline processes? What additional markets would welcome your product or service?
How can the product evolve? Do your employees have additional talents that haven’t yet been tapped? Get staff involved in new activities. Perhaps cross-train them to handle other responsibilities. Give employees time to brainstorm together, free of any structured meeting time.
In its September 2015 post, “Why Creativity is so Crucial for Entrepreneurs,” cleverest.com says there’s always room for improvement in the deliverables of an enterprise, and creativity is how you can access it. The author urges you to find similar patterns in different areas:
“Creativity enables people to connect dissimilar and unrelated subjects and make successful entrepreneurial ideas. Merging different fields creates interesting intersections that creates new niches. Most people are afraid of bringing different disciplines together, but most interesting ideas come from colliding different fields.”
Cheryl Conner, a contributor to Forbes, outlines in her post, “4 Ways to Increase Creativity As An Entrepreneur,” a method for breakthrough thinking:
1. Ditch your comfort zone.
2. Discover your thinking profile.
3. Remember that great minds don’t actually think alike.
4. Play to your creative strength.
What are those strengths?
Conner describes a clarifier digging into facts for insights; an ideatorthinking big to open up possibilities; a developer crafting complex solutions; or an implementor who loves to get things done and willingly takes risks. The commonality is that these creative types are each doers and they each lead to new pathways.
Try This Creative Exercise
Business leaders need to schedule time in their daily or weekly agenda for creative thinking.
Start by writing the name of your most successful product or service in the middle of a blank sheet of paper. Then freestyle every word that comes to mind, either written or drawn around the center of the paper. It can be numbers, letters, sketches – whatever.
After you fill the paper put it away. Look at it fresh tomorrow. Have a colleague look at it, too. You might just find the next successful evolution of your company.
