Two factors that impact individual creativity and business performance

   Yesterday in the article "Creativityin business" we talked about brain training is inevitable for people to keep their competitive advantages in business environment nowadays.

   From my point of view, the factors that may impact individual creativity and business performance can be roughly categorised into two groups, the institutionalised factor and individual factor.

   Institutionalised factor indicates the layers of rules, standard operating procedures, and bureaucratic processes. Organisations develop these rules in order to operate and manage their business. However, bureaucratic structure and rigid norm can stifle creativity. Some organisations have started to streamline their extant rules, yet providing an environment that is creativity-friendly sometimes contradicts the extant rules. Encourage employees to break the extant rules through empowerment may help stimulate their creativity - with the precondition that no deviant actions will take place. 

   Individual factor refers to personal behaviour, internet addiction disorder (IAD), is specified here. For individuals, to keep one's brain in an actively creative status, one has to be aware of the IAD. IAD indicates the out-of-control internet using behaviour and is recognised as one kind of clinical disorder. Researchers from China have conducted studies by MRI brain scans on 35 participants, in which 17 of them are internet addictive. They found that in IAD patients' brain, abnormal white matter exists in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making, and cognitive control. They concluded that IAD may have same effect on human brain as cocaine. Cocaine is central nervous system (CNS) toxic when over-dosing or abusing. Hence, IAD may have negative impact on individuals' abilities in generating creative and innovative ideas and enhance their competitive advantages.

   Silicon Valley has also suggested individuals to be away from the devices, including computer and internet, in order to prevent themselves from the occurrence of IAD and keep personal performance and interpersonal relationships in workplace. 

Reference:

*BBC: Web addicts have brain changes, research suggests

*The New York Times: Silicon Valley Says Step Away From the Device

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.