#3 Customers will come to you if someone else tells them to. That someone will be one of your unpaid sales-force who say wonderful things about you and your business to other people. They may be someone who has met you, has been impressed with you and what you have to say. Or they may be an existing customer or client who has experienced your superb customer service. They might just be someone who has heard about how good your products and service really are.

f) Organisational Culture. We can all be more creative, so what is stopping us? Often people complain of some degree of evaluation apprehension – this manifests itself in many ways but two of most common are a fear of seeming unintelligent or unoriginal. Some cultures are more risk averse than others, others do not manage competition well and yet others engender friction by misallocating resources.

g) Organisational structure. Many theories argue that certain structures, such as hierarchical and mechanistic, hinder creativity and innovation. Whilst these theories generally tend towards validity, there are many reasons why a business has a particular organisational structure - history, logistics, market segmentation, product line, strategy and so forth – therefore it is unreasonable to ask a firm to change it. Ultimately, what managers need, is a knowledge of properties of a fostering structure so that they may incorporate those elements into their existing one.

This field yields much interesting data. For example, many respondents argued that all structures, even those so-called flat structures, are in reality hierarchical.

Some very simple changes can be implemented. These include:

i)Direct communication links to decision makers. ii)Cross-divisional information flow. iii)Tangible progress of ideas.

Part 2 of Managing Creativity & Innovation will discuss Group Structure, Knowledge, Networks and Collaboration, Radical and Incremental Creativity and Innovation, Structure and Goals, Process and Valuation.

Kal Bishop, MBA, http://www.managing-creativity.com