22nd March 2022

Want to change the world? Or just your bit of it? What’s the single most important thing you need? It’s not passion or resilience or even a fabulous idea backed by a realistic business plan, although all those things help.

 

The prerequisite for innovation is agency

Put simply: entrepreneurs do what they do, good or bad, because they can. They have agency: money, power, influence. So, if you don’t have much agency of your own, you’re going to have to find some. How?

It seems to me that there are three types of innovation: those you can do yourself, those that need other people, and those that need permission. The first should be easy – what’s stopping you? Good luck with the last: permission-givers usually represent a status quo that doesn’t really like change. The rest need partnerships – alliances that must be built.

However, persuasion is a two-way street – ask yourself whether you are really listening or just waiting for your turn to speak. You need a message appropriate to its audience, short and sweet enough to start a conversation. Can you do it, as I’ve tried to do, in a headline and 200 words? Because communication is not what you mean – it’s what they understand.

 

 Creativity – what’s that all about?

A word lots of people use without explaining exactly what they mean by it.. For me the essence is transformation, whether it be from one substance to another, or from one behaviour to another, or from one emotion to another.

But where does it come from? Not from thin air, that’s for sure. It can happen by accident – serendipity. It happens when we notice analogies – pattern recognition – what works there may be relevant here. Another way is through dissociation – breaking things apart, then building different combinations that simply were not there before.

This is the secret – if you want to have good ideas you need to create lots of ideas, then throw away the bad ones. But you can’t judge them in advance, by the very criteria they sweep away – because radical creativity changes the context, shifts the paradigm. There’s always an element of surprise – that’s why occasionally it looks like magic.

Although it is hard to predict and uncertainty can be uncomfortable, this interpretation of innovation and change suggests that the creative process is one that anyone can summon deliberately. It’s no mystery – rather a ‘magic trick’ that we can teach and learn, practise and improve.

 

 Understanding innovation as creative problem-solving

 Stuff happens – why? What are the drivers of change? Perhaps there’s an internal dynamic – pressures and stresses within. Maybe it’s external, frequently fast-moving developments and discoveries. How to react? First of all, don’t panic – crisis and opportunity often go hand-in-hand. The great challenge is knowing when to defend the status quo and when to replace it.

A lot of time and energy can be saved by spending a little of both understanding what seems to be the problem. Some situations are quite straightforward; others are complex systems – interacting and interrelated elements and stakeholders, each with their own point of view but forming something bigger than the sum of their parts. Mess with one or more and there will be consequences, so choose your intervention point with care. Asking the right question is all-important.

Next, you need to create multiple responses, not just the first acceptable one. What can be done better? What might be done differently? Even, perhaps, what could be done without?

It really is that simple, but success depends on getting this bit right. The more options available, the better the chances of choosing the best one – the creative thought that can be turned into a creative deed.

 

How to save the world – diversity and collective intelligence

What to have for breakfast is a problem that is solved every day all over the world. But it’s not a simple problem – simple problems have single solutions. What to have for breakfast is complex.

Solutions are determined by an ability to make something of whatever is in store. There is no ideal breakfast, no perfect recipe. So the bigger your store-cupboard the better, but what if you ask your neighbour? They might have some things you are missing. You could team up – if we wanted to, we could call it ‘taking a multidisciplinary approach’.

That’s the power of collaboration – all of us know more than any one of us. Collective intelligence is always going to be greater than an individual’s. But if your fellows all come from a similar tradition to yours they are likely to imagine a similar range of possibilities.

That’s where diversity comes into its own – not only an increased selection of ingredients but often completely different ways of combining them, cooking and serving them. It’s embracing the other vital element of teamwork: that every one of us knows something the rest of us do not. Diversity doesn’t just add to your options, it multiplies them!

 

But you can’t teach entrepreneurship, can you?

Of course you can. It’s an easily observable, much studied behaviour, and behaviours are learned. Whilst entrepreneurs come in many different shapes and sizes, they all display distinct traits – agency, opportunity recognition, creativity, a sense of purpose and an appreciation of risk, along with a capacity for flexibility.

Good luck certainly plays a part, and bad luck can come with a heavy price. The paradox is that, while good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement.

Practical entrepreneurship is not explicit knowledge – the manual only gets you so far. Like learning to swim, there comes a moment when you have to get your feet wet. But why would you jump in at the deep end? The good news is that there is clear evidence that deliberate practice is the best way to learn – as good if not better than long years’ experience. Because the feedback is immediate, you don’t have to wait for ‘next time’ to see if you’ll sink or swim.

It’s no surprise that enterprise education displays the same characteristics as its subject: bringing value by doing better, by doing differently. And so it will develop. It’s in its nature – that’s what makes it so exciting.

 

Paul Kirkham is a former researcher in the field of entrepreneurial creativity at Nottingham University Business School’s Haydn Green Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HGIIE).