'There are two types of creativity: the creativity of making zero to one, and the creativity of making one to 1,000," wrote Kazuhiko Nishi, a pioneering software entrepreneur who joined Microsoft in its early days and later became a leader of Ascii Corporation.
Mr Nishi is right that in business, we can clearly distinguish various levels of creativity that differ in their nature and their innovation focus. I have identified five different levels.
Level 1: Making minus two to minus one. Imagine you must manoeuvre a giant vehicle, let's say a bucket-wheel excavator. It hardly moves at all -- if it's not sliding backwards. This bulky, heavy, rigid vehicle burns lots of fuel, oil and money.
The creativity of making minus two to minus one focuses on ideas to save costs and resources, help bulky organisations become leaner, meaner and more agile, simplify processes and structures and raise efficiency.
At this entry level, it's easy to come up with ideas for incremental improvements. Everyone can contribute. And guess what? Your competitors can easily come up with such simple ideas too. As such, level-one creativity won't set your firm apart from your competitors -- it just raises your odds of survival.
Level 2: Making zero to one. Let's trade your giant vehicle for a car that clearly moves you forward, as it has more than one gear.
At this zero-to-one level, you're creating ideas for meaningful, new and original value offerings. You may do this through product and service innovation, solution design and customer-experience design, whereby you shift gears upwards and gain momentum as you move towards more advanced innovation types. This is because profit margins tend to increase as we move up from product innovation to customer-experience design due to a higher perception of value.
Level 3: Making one to two. Now you swap your standard car for a brand-name sports car. It has a button that activates a turbo booster that doubles your acceleration in each gear. What a joy to see the envious looks of other drivers when the turbo kicks in and you speed off!
Creativity on the third level magnifies your value offering through cool marketing and design ideas such as a clever promotional campaign, sleek packaging, an outstanding brand and an inspirational corporate image.
Just as hitting the "turbo drive" button accelerates your car in each gear, ideas for value magnification amplify the perception of value in the eyes of customers, allowing you to charge higher prices and fatten your profit margin.
Level 4: Making one to 1,000. Are you starting to feel bored driving vehicles confined to the ground? Would it not be wonderful to fly above everyone else, to own and control empty airspace?
On this fourth level of creativity, you look for ideas that multiply value -- for example, you don't cater only to one group of customers but serve multiple groups, you don't sell your value offerings in only one country but in almost all countries, you don't use only one channel but multiple channels.
Creativity at this level gives you a giant lever to lift your business into the sky and beyond your competitors. But you need to create ideas for entire new channels, new networks, new partnerships and new business models. Level-four ideas are more conceptual, technical and quantitative in nature. Ideally, they lead to one integrated new platform that you control, one that is the only pathway to gain access to your value offering.
Level 5: Making minus two to 1,000. Now suppose you dare mentally to depart from all existing vehicles on the market. You envision a future where each home has virtual-reality rooms and 3D printers (both of which are likely to lower the need for mobility) or, in a more distant future, teleportation.
If you're part of a visionary leadership team that is bold and brave enough to create a new future for a stagnating corporation, then you're ready for this peak level of creativity. In a true strategy innovation project, you generate ideas on how to make your company become a leader in an emerging market space.
To do this, you play on all the lower levels of creativity and integrate all ideas into one strategic roadmap. You will have truly creative value offerings marketed under an avant-garde brand using hip promotional and image campaigns and tied into a state-of-the-art delivery platform that unifies channel partners, networks, modern payment options and business models. At the same time, you structure the operations and processes of your new business unit in a lean, simple and resource-effective way to keep a cost advantage over the inevitable followers.
Dr Detlef Reis is the founding director and chief ideator of Thinkergy Ltd (Thinkergy.com), an ideation and innovation company in Asia, and an adjunct associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. He can be reached at dr.d@thinkergy.com