Creativity in business

   This afternoon I read an interesting article on CNNMoney website: “Companies turn to brain games to tackle work stress”. In this article, the author Katherine Reynolds Lewis introduced the user experiences from several organisations that have applied the MyBrainSolution provided by Brain Resource, an organisation that develops brain products to help people keep the health of their brains.

   Knowledge management and organisational skills have shown its importance nowadays. Such phenomena results in the emergence of the programmes mentioned in this CNNMoney article. In order to keep the competitive advantage, the brain training is compulsory for people in business environment. Gregory Bayer, the chief executive of Brain Resource, explained the importance of training our brains: "The brain, we're finding out, is much like muscles in the body. If you exercise it, it gets better. You actually grow neurons…. If you can teach people how to manage those multitasking and stressful environments optimally, you're going to preserve their health."

   So now here comes the question: How do such brain training programmes be beneficial for business? According to Kathleen Herath, the associate vice president for health and productivity at Nationwide, "The best outcomes are when people are doing this along with another programme.” In other words, brain training can be a key factor in changing organisational behaviour.

   Hence, it will be beneficial for a business in the long run to encourage employees to use their creativity through empowerment. Creativity is defined by Amabile, the professor in Harvard Business School, as the quality of products or responses that are regarded to be creative by appropriate observers, and it can also be viewed as the process by which something so judged is produced.  

   In the fast changing business environment, creativity can enable business developing innovative products and processes, and handling with the problems relevant with organisational behaviours. However, when dealing with issues about creativity, the managers should at the same time try to develop integrity with stakeholders both inside and outside the organisation, since it is easy for people to relax standard when seeking for some novel ideas. Under such situation, a tension exists inevitably between creativity and ethics, which can be an important issue for knowledge management in business in the future.

Reference:

*CNNMoney: Companies turn to brain games to tackle work stress.

*Amabile (1996), "Creativity and Innovation in Organisations", Harvard Business School, 9-396-239.