Managing creativity – without loosing it

The balance between efficiency and creativity doesn’t come easy. Creating a corporate innovation culture takes time, focus, and talent. Killing it doesn’t. Most companies know that by experience. Even the ones with lots of innovation mojo can loose it when creativity  is over-managed.

No doubt, creative processes can be optimised significantly by lean-thinking. Only problem is that creative processes – to some extent – are expected to produce unexpected output aka innovations or inventions.  So if you apply e.g. Six Sigma in the design lab, in the exact same way as in the logistics department or in manufacturing – what do you think will happen?

Business Week’s 3M’s Innovation Crisis makes some real good points on the art of managing innovation and creation – without loosing it. Worth spending a couple of minutes on.