How to raise creativity?

Again and again I am coming back to the comparison between entrepreneurship and football game; since I can see something in common between them, let’s take the team, for instance. 

It goes without saying that the match is entirely depended on its players, teams as a whole. And it means that you need to be extremely careful when hiring people you going to work with, it is like when you going to date someone, you choose one and the best among thousands, because you are going to work with those people and you spend most of your time with them. You have to build both strong and competent team, who you can trust to, who you can rely on. That is very important especially nowadays when it becomes rather easy either to sell or to buy information or idea. Team building is one of the most important and vital component of success that should be paid attention on. 

Moreover, it’s also significant to know that if you want to be innovative you need to raise creativity in your team members. But how, whether it’s possible- that’s the question.
If your coworkers have inherited talent of creating you are lucky, if not, there are some techniques that can be helpful and efficient, anyway it’s also useful to train this ability.


Many classic creative thinking techniques make use of one or more of methods such as evolution, synthesis, revolution, reapplication, changing direction. The first that came to my mind is Brainstorming (“Applied Imagination” by Alex Osborn) which is probably the best known and certainly one of the most powerful for idea generating for specific problems. It helps to break out of the habit-bound thinking and to produce a set of ideas from which we can choose. 

To encourage parallel thinking the technique of Six Thinking Hats by Dr. de Bono is used. This method doesn’t describe the labels of thinking but six different directions, ways of thinking that can be used in problem-solving. 

To create the associations for idea generation the technique of Talking Pictures by Brian Clegg can be taught, when you need to split up into teams, take a digital camera and make photos as many as possible. Each group should use the picture provided to create associations that occur to them and then use these associations for idea generation.

As for as training creativity is concerned its also possible to use LARC (Left and Right Creativity) , The Journalistic Six (six general questions that can create another view of problem solving), Historical Examination, Blocking and Block Busting that includes: uses for, improvements to, what-iffing, attribute analysis, analogy and metaphor, trigger concepts. 

As we can notice there are enough creativity techniques that can be used. And implementation one of them certainly depends on the problem itself. 
 
There may also be questions about how to motivate employers for creativity. Although rewards and incentives are widely used they can actually be either effective or counterproductive. Incentives and rewards provide extrinsic motivation; they motivate someone to work on something primarily as a means to an end – the reward . 

At the same time, it’s of course important for people to be treated fairly and recognized. However it’s important not to overpay here, you need to follow the balance. Talking about motivation methods we need to clarify that creative people don’t seek for money or reward at the end, they are actually doing what they like to do aside from whether they are paid or not, their final point is a result of creativity that comes from inside, not money. 

Besides, a company can use some techniques to increase intrinsic motivation for creativity such as, for example, it can create good, appropriate conditions of working for their employees, support them by social programs, give long-term loans and etc.  

By contrast, in the words of W. Edwards Deming: 
Some extrinsic motivation helps to build self-esteem. But total submission to external motivation leads to distraction of the individual. Extrinsic motivation in the extreme crushes intrinsic motivation .

In the conclusion I would like to say that to raise the creativity its vital to know who motivate to and by what means, cause not all of them (methods) are suitable for certain conditions at certain time with certain recourses.