Creativity is the emergent business strategy - an awareness surfacing more and more frequently in business literature. In an earlier post, I referenced Creative Clusters and the annual Creative Economy Network and Conference. The theme of a creative economy - creativity for profitable business - has been gaining momentum over the past few years…and it seems to be reaching a tipping point. (Finally!) I recently revisited an article I read a few years ago in Business Week Online called The Creative Economy. Still relevant today, the follow are excerpts from the article, written by Peter Coy:
Which companies will thrive in the coming years? Those that value ideas above all else.
Now the Industrial Economy is giving way to the Creative Economy, and corporations are at another crossroads. Attributes that made them ideal for the 20th century could cripple them in the 21st. So they will have to change, dramatically. The Darwinian struggle of daily business will be won by the people--and the organizations-- that adapt most successfully to the new world that is unfolding.
The sheer abundance of capital could be bad for the capitalists themselves, including ordinary investors in the stock market. That's because the commodity they supply--money--is no longer scarce. What's scarce are the good ideas. Thus, shareholders are likely to lose some power in the 21st century, while entrepreneurs and idea-generating employees gain it.
In the Creative Economy, the most important intellectual property isn't software or music or movies. It's the stuff inside employees' heads. When assets were physical things like coal mines, shareholders truly owned them. But when the vital assets are people, there can be no true ownership. The best that corporations can do is to create an environment that makes the best people want to stay.
But in the Creative Economy, the power to exert influence is nearly unlimited because there's no ceiling on how many people can be made to depend on idea-based assets.
Many corporations have already begun to adjust to the new realities of the Creative Economy--by allowing power to tilt from the sources of capital toward the sources of ideas, by embedding themselves in fertile corporate ecosystems, and by adopting codes of social responsibility to win the trust of a wary public.
Read the full article at http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_35/b3696002.htm
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