Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

Creating opportunity, for ourselves and for others, is what this book is all about. Its aim is to help readers unlock their creative potential and apply it in a way that'll help them thrive as individuals, or as members of organizations, in a rapidly changing world. But Creative Intelligence also has a more ambitious aim: to empower people to use their creativity to find antidotes to some of today's economic, social, and environmental problems. It advocates a new economic model, one with creativity at its core.

So who's this book for? Creative Intelligence is aimed at a broad market and its tips are relevant to the personal and professional lives of a range of readers. But we think it'll be of most interest to people who need to innovate in their work, or people looking to launch or grow a start-up.

Perhaps you're an individual or a corporate team member with an idea for a new product or service and you're wondering how to bring it to market. Or maybe you're the CEO of a large company that's struggling to innovate and you need to get your employees' creative juices flowing. You may have been laid off and are looking for a new direction, or perhaps you're a graduate who's bursting with creative energy and who's searching for a way to channel this into a successful career. This book can help you do that.

Creative Intelligence shows us how giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook became the cutting-edge, global companies they are today. It explains how small entrepreneurs built global businesses from the comfort of their own homes. And it shows what can go wrong if you fail to tap into the power of creativity or refuse to innovate.

The author has plenty of experience to draw on when discussing creativity and innovation. He's the former assistant managing editor of Business Week, where he started its coverage of the annual International Design Excellence Award and the World's Most Innovative Companies survey. He's professor of innovation at Parsons School of Design, and is the founder of the Innovation & Design online channel and a quarterly innovation magazine. He's also an award-winning writer and a prolific blogger.

So keep listening to hear how to get the knowledge you need to kick-start your business, how to create a space where creative magic can happen, and why making and selling stuff has never been easier.

The author bases this book on five "creative competencies" that can help people learn first, how to create, and then how to turn their creations into products or services that make a profit and change lives for the better.

These five competencies are: knowledge mining, the practice of finding out what's meaningful to people through effective, targeted research; framing, which means understanding your perspective and changing your focus if necessary; playing, which involves bringing the idea of games into creative processes; making, which celebrates building things physically, rather than thinking and strategizing; and pivoting, which is the vital step between coming up with an idea and turning it into reality.

The author devotes the bulk of the book to these five concepts, explaining how they work and telling stories about companies and individuals who've successfully adopted them. The use of case studies, especially those involving household names like Apple founder Steve Jobs or Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, makes the book accessible to a broad audience and keeps the reader's interest.

The author wanders from one industry to another, from history to the present day, and through the fields of psychology, sociology, and economic theory, among others, so there's a lot to take in. It's clear he's done his research, but his tips on how to get more creative and harness this creativity can sometimes get lost among all the facts, figures, and anecdotes. So if you're looking for a practical "How To" kind of book, you might end up frustrated. That said, the practical tips the author does present are really useful and many of the case studies speak for themselves.

Now, the author isn't the first person to highlight the value of being more creative in the classroom, the boardroom, and the corridors of power. Far from it. But he offers some interesting insights you might not have seen elsewhere, and his theories and tips are backed up by extensive experience in the field. He's definitely an authoritative voice – with an engaging writing style to boot.

So let's take a look at the author's ideas on knowledge mining. The concepts he explores in this chapter include looking to the past to gain inspiration for new products or services, cultivating a kind of wisdom called "donut knowledge" – in other words, trying to see what isn't there – and casting around for ideas like a determined fisherman.

He also champions the benefits of immersion – getting deep inside a culture or a market, or exploring a topic long enough to spark creativity.

He illustrates this point with a case study of the Chinese technology firm Lenovo. Lenovo faced stiff competition at the turn of the century from the likes of IBM, Dell, and HP, which were offering lower prices and also Western-made products, held in high esteem by China's new generation of consumers.

To wrestle back market share, Lenovo hired the Portland, Oregon-based innovation and design consultancy Ziba Design to help it assess the new consumer base and design products accordingly. Ziba, a company whose employees represented 18 nationalities speaking 25 languages at the time of the author's writing, is well practiced in the art of getting inside a culture.

Ziba's goal was to help Lenovo compete not just on cost and prestige, but also on value and meaning, and to do so it needed to get inside the heads of its prospective consumers. Before leaving for China, Ziba's team of designers and researchers filled a room with Chinese culture, from music, to magazines, to every day accessories like wallets and cell phones, as well as Chinese exchange students. This was stage one of the immersion process.

Once in the country, the team spent a month immersed in Chinese culture in three different regions: riding bicycles, busses, and trains, dining on pigeon, and singing in karaoke bars, all alongside native Chinese people.

Ziba also signed up local volunteers, asking them to photograph their work and leisure time, particularly moments when they used technology as part of their routine.

Ziba took all the information it gathered back to Portland, analyzed it, and came up with five distinct groups of consumers, with different needs and ways of using technology. The company then worked with Lenovo to gage the size of each segment of the market. Lenovo ultimately produced three new products to meet the unique needs of these client groups. The immersion strategy worked – Lenovo increased its share of the Chinese PC market and in 2012 was ahead of rivals including Acer, Dell, and HP.

We liked some of the innovative ways Ziba's researchers immersed themselves in the Chinese market. And, while it's clear this kind of project requires huge resources, it's easy to see how it can be replicated on a smaller scale. Sometimes, just taking a class or learning a little more about a topic can be enough to spark creativity, the author says.

Let's now look at the concept of playing. This is about throwing the rules to one side and letting your spirit roam free. It's about taking away the boundaries and social norms that so often limit our interactions with others and stop us from being our true selves. But how do you create the right environment for this to happen?

If you want to enable your colleagues or employees to play, and thereby boost their creative output, there are a number of guidelines you can follow, the author says.

Firstly, it's important to build or set aside a physical space, away from normal working activity, where people can forget their day-to-day tasks and switch off from commitments. Secondly, you have to set some parameters for the play – perhaps how and when people interact with each other or around time boundaries. When you're setting these parameters, make sure you strike the right balance between structure and freedom.

Finally, you need to think carefully before choosing the people who will play together – trust is a key element and without it, those creative juices simply won't flow. Players need to feel free to speak their minds, fall flat on their faces, make mistakes, and learn from them.

If you can get these three elements right, you'll create a magic circle – an environment in which creative energy flows and players come up with innovative products or ideas for services.

Apple is a master of magic circles and the art of play. Its products speak volumes about the benefits of giving designers the freedom to play around, tweaking products without the need for a formal, review process. As you'd imagine, the late Steve Jobs and his company appear frequently in this book, but the author balances things out with plenty of references to other successful innovators, in the United States and abroad.

But what if you don't work for a corporate giant like Apple but you still want to create something? In the chapter on making, the author says technology, new online sales platforms, social media, and a burgeoning market for homemade and locally sourced products means it’s easy to turn your brainwave into something concrete and to bring it to market.

With the changes in the global economy in recent years, the current state of the global jobs market, and a desire for greater flexibility in our professional lives, more and more of us are starting our own businesses. And, in a backlash against globalization and corporate monopolies, many of today's consumers are happier to buy from smaller companies and individuals.

To take advantage of this environment, you first need to spot a gap in the market. This may seem complicated, but sometimes all you need to do is look around your own home or tap into your own feelings and experiences. This is what Amy Turn Sharp and her husband Joe did when a manufacturer recalled two toys belonging to their young sons, for fear they contained lead paint. The couple were annoyed and decided to channel this annoyance into something productive.

Joe was a master carpenter and Amy had experience in remodeling and marketing, from selling old houses in Columbus, Ohio. They combined their talents to produce a line of natural wooden children's toys and founded the company Little Alouette. As their business grew, they took advantage of online platforms to expand their sales, and then used social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, to scale up. Now they sell wooden toys made from sustainable trees harvested locally to friends, neighbors, and clients in France, Brazil, Canada, and China.

With online sales platforms like eBay and Amazon, easy-to-use video-sharing platforms like YouTube, and a huge array of globalized social media tools, your creation could become a worldwide bestseller before you know it. While not all entrepreneurial ventures succeed, we like the author's optimism here and think this chapter on making, and the chapter on pivoting, will be especially useful for would-be entrepreneurs.

As you heard earlier, the author is also interested in the bigger picture. It's essential we all tap our creative intelligence if we're to resolve some of the big problems of our time, he says. He proposes supplementing the standard IQ measure with a creativity quotient, which he calls CQ, and suggests how we can measure this. He argues we need to base our economic systems on innovation, and says governments should foster creativity in the classroom as well as promote entrepreneurial ventures in the business world.

His arguments aren't entirely original and they're a little idealistic in places, but he certainly makes a very strong case for the benefits of firing up our creative potential and channeling it into something that rewards us financially, brings us satisfaction, and is of service to the global economy and the wider world.

Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum is published by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.