Creativity in innovation plays a vital role in the success of a firm to introduce unique, new products and services into the marketplace. But these activities don’t need to rely always on good luck (although luck is essential). Clayton’s article “finding new markets for new and disruptive technologies” introduces three tools to help structure this creative process:
1. Shifting the basis of competition
2. Discovering what has been discovered
3. Discovery-driven planning

We have discussed before on shifting the basis of competition, let’s focus now on the next two tools. Discovering what has been discovered. The simple lesson here is to stand in a different place, which means step out of your comfort zone and interact with different groups of people, from unrelated fields of knowledge who would force you to think, literally … “outside-the-box.” So you could creatively adapt innovations discovered in a separate domain to be relevant and useful in the firm’s products. Discovery-driven planning is building plans to learn. It is a handy tool when uncertainty about a market condition in the near-future is challenging to assess. It usually happens when companies are innovating in emerging markets and managers can benefit from using discovery-driven planning to validate their assumptions that confirm acceptable ROI for the firm’s investment in their projects. A final note about creativity and business is a growing focus on redefining business model and how to transform ideas into innovation. Five years ago, I received by mail the call for the 2013 C2-MTL Global Conference with the tagline: Creativity is everybody’s business. I agree.