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L14.- Strategy Needs Creativity (Strategy from Combination (One way in…
L14.- Strategy Needs Creativity
In the article they explored four approaches to building a breakthrough strategy.
Creation, in its most fundamental sense, means bringing something entirely new into existence. Likewise, creativity is, by definition, about moving away from what already exists.
Often, creativity is more or less defined this way --- as an act of challenge or rebellion, breaking with what has gone before. This is obviously central to creativity, but it is not the whole picture.
Experts on the subject of creativity talk about various other inputs to the endeavor. Strategists who want to think creatively need a framework to help them remember and apply a number of these inputs.
Strategy from Contrast
Perhaps the most prominent current practitioner of strategy from contrast is Elon Musk. He takes a status quo and directly contradicts one of the assumptions underlying it.
The result is a move that contrasts sharply with convention. Thus, in the early days of the Internet, few people thought it could be safer to transfer money online compared with the old way of sending checks or money orders via mail.
But Musk bet the future on exactly this shift when he merged his online bank X.com with an online payments startup called Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and three others) to form PayPal.
Today, Musk’s venture SpaceX is working to change spaceflight from publicly-funded, fixed-schedule, one-time rockets to the exact opposite, namely, privately-funded, on-demand, reusable rockets.
Contradiction is one logical operation to perform on the status quo. Another is inversion.
The value chain in an industry is conventionally oriented one way --- with certain players in the role of suppliers and other players in the role of customers. Inverting the value chain yields new business models that contrast with convention.
Strategy from Combination
One way in which Einstein practiced “thinking what no one else has thought” was through what he called the “combinatory play” of ideas.
In one of his famous thought experiments, he combined the idea of a ride in an elevator (a rather new technology back when he was writing) with the idea of a journey to outer space (where humans have yet to travel), to come up with his theory of gravitation.
In business, too, creative and successful moves can come from combination. The world of complementary products and services is one important arena in which these moves are seen.
A good example is the complementarity between products and payment systems.
Thus, the Chinese social media platform WeChat (owned by Tencent) includes an integrated mobile payment platform called WeChat Pay that enables users to buy and sell products within their social networks. In other combining moves, both Tencent and Alibaba (which owns WeChat Pay competitor Alipay) are now partnering with overseas payment firms to enable retailers in other countries to accept their mobile payment services.
New technologies are a big source of combinatorial possibilities. AI and blockchain come together naturally to protect the privacy of the large amounts of personal data needed to train algorithms in sensitive areas such as healthcare, and people can also be paid via tokens for providing such data.
Blockchain and IoT (the Internet of Things) come together in the form of sensors and secure data in decentralized applications such as food supply chains, transportation systems, and smart homes, with automated insurance layered on top in the form of smart contracts.
Strategy from Constraint
In business, too, creative thinking accepts constraints and limitations and turns them into opportunities to exercise the imagination.
That constraints can aid creative work and strategy making may seem a bit paradoxical. Lift a constraint and any action that was previously possible is surely still possible, and likely more is now possible. But this misses the point that there is not just one way to think in a given situation and a constraint may prompt a whole new line of thinking and doing.
Of course, a kind of Goldilocks Principle must apply. Too many constraints will choke off all possibilities. But few constraints may not always be optimal either. It seems there is a notion of having just the right number of constraints to spur creativity.
Business strategists must be on the lookout for constraints that promote imagination and new strategies.
But they must also guard against the flip side. Resources that are in good supply and that might, at first blush, appear to be strengths may actually be sources of weakness.
The world’s first science fiction story Frankenstein was written when its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, summering on the shore of Lake Geneva during an unusually cold and stormy summer of 1818, found herself trapped indoors with only her imagination to exercise.
Artists know a lot about constraints, even profound ones such as serious setbacks in their lives that they turn into moments of greater self-expression and creativity.
Strategy from Contex
Evolution has already solved a lot of problems. An entire field, biomimetics, is devoted to finding solutions in nature to problems that arise in engineering, materials science, medicine, and elsewhere.
To find a clothing fastener that does not jam (as zippers are prone to do), look to the burrs from the burdock plant, which propagate by attaching themselves to the fur of animals via tiny hooks. This is the origin of Velcro, invented in 1941.
Today, the gripping mechanism of geckos is being studied to come up with good solutions for how robots can pick up objects ranging from coffee cups to space debris.
This is a classic problem-solving technique. Start with a problem in one context. Look to another context where there is an analogous problem that has already been solved.
Then import the solution into the first context. Just like good problem solvers, creative strategists know that shifting contexts can be a powerful stimulus to having new thoughts.
Context switching can be across industries, as in Intel’s case, or even across time.
The development of the graphical user interface (GUI) for computers was the result of a step backwards in a sense from the text-based context in which programming had grown up to thinking about the highly visual eye-hand environment in which young children operate.
Now, some AI researchers are engaging in a similar context switch by looking to how children learn in order to build similar processes into machine learning.
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FUENTE: Brandenburger, A. (2019). Strategy Needs Creativity. Harvard Business Review, 97(2).