Creativity and Innovation for Managers

Preface

There is probably no business discipline more subject to ‘do as I say, not as I do’ than creativity. A survey of major US companies taken in the mid-1990s found that 80 per cent of firms said that innovation was important to their business, while only 4 per cent thought they did it well. This disparity is frightening, but probably not surprising.

Michael Porter of Harvard Business School in his classic book, Competitive Advantage (Free Press, 1998), defined three ways to achieve competitive advantage: differentiation, cost-cutting and finding a niche market. Each of these vehicles depends on creativity to work effectively. Differentiation requires new approaches to products and services to make a company significantly different from the ...