 November 2001 Vol. 31, No. 11, p 1. |
Every month, the CI crew spends a couple of hours around a conference table brainstorming the artwork for the upcoming issues. Sometimes an author provides all the graphics we need for an article. More often, Irv Davis, our art director, creates something original for the magazine cover and the first pages of several feature articles, or he hires freelancers to take our ideas and come up with illustrations. Sometimes the wackiest ideas turn into the best concepts—images that capture the essence of the articles and make you want to read them.
This month, many of our articles focus on creativity—a happy, if unplanned confluence of manuscripts that came in at the right time. As we were discussing the article topics at our art meeting, Paul Serrano, our composition specialist, wondered if you could really “manufacture creativity” by setting up special groups, putting them in special locations, and telling them to “come up with something”. It would be great if you could assemble a team, assign them a task and a deadline, allocate a few resources, and come up with x units of creative thinking that add $y to your quarterly profits on a predictable basis. I don’t know of any companies that have actually done that—do you?
Jack Hipple and his colleagues wondered how to sustain creativity in a corporate setting: Why had so many former innovation champions gone into consulting, started their own companies, or retired? Why do some corporate innovation centers thrive, while others close their doors after a decade or two? How does a company harness its employees’ creative energy and use it to move the business forward?
Unilever’s formula for fostering creativity is to teach their employees to break free of mental ruts and create an environment where new concepts can grow. Nel Mostert tells us about that company’s efforts to “acquire and measure creativity”. Unilever employees encourage and nurture nascent ideas that might seem unorthodox, but eventually lead to successful new products and procedures. The assumption is that employees are already creative, but they need an environment that won’t stifle their ideas.
Creativity can mean coming up with a completely new idea, but it can also be a talent for looking at the same old things from a different angle. Ken Sandhage saw ceramics where his metallurgist colleagues saw corrosion, and he came up with a way to make complex ceramic shapes that hold up in the kiln. He’s almost ready to take his method to the marketplace. This could be a great way to make everything from body armor to artificial hip joints, but can he make a profit? Read Laurel Sheppard’s article on Sandhage’s research and see what you think.
It’s a condiment! It’s a metal cleaner! It’s both! Debra Schwartz reports new uses for familiar sauces, and she delves into the whys and wherefores of the stuff we put on our food. Did you ever think that meat juices could be a way to reduce the cost of medical care? Somebody did. If that’s not creative, what is?
Creativity can also mean challenging an established bit of conventional wisdom and compiling an impressive body of evidence to back up your idea. Jay Lehr tackles the Kyoto Protocol’s assumptions on the causes of global warming. He asks us to look at global warming from an angle you won’t see on a TV news report.
Norman De Lue and David Nicolaides explore high-throughput experimentation—the try-everything approach that includes combinatorial synthesis and data mining. Here, the creativity is in asking the right questions, setting up the experiments, and making sense of the resulting data deluge.
We never did really answer Paul’s question. None of our authors this month has found a way to manufacture creativity, but they have plenty of ideas on how to recognize and encourage it. Can you make people create on a schedule and innovate only profitable products? Is it worth pursuing an idea that might take 20 years to come to fruition? How do you take an idea that comes out of left field and build it into a salable product?
Why bother with creativity in the first place? We’re scientists, not artists, after all. Nel Mostert summed it up: “Without creativity, there is no innovation.”
Nancy K. McGuire is associate editor of Chemical Innovation.
