Creativity is not enough

When you have stopped innovating on the way you are doing your business, you have stopped entrepreneuring. Put in another way, when an entrepreneur’s passion and creativity cannot produce innovations, or worse, when the passion is gone, the business will start to decline.

And so, even if a popular dictum says, "If it ain’t broke, why fix it?", I dare propose the opposite: "Even if it ain’t broke, fix it!"

What I want to stress here is that complacency is not a trait of an entrepreneur. Creativity and innovativeness are the critical distinguishing characteristics of an entrepreneur. Not all creative work can be considered as innovations but all innovations are creative work.

There are certain fundamentals that must be in place for creativity to become innovation. These have to do with the knowledge of markets and technology. Innovation happens when creativity is used to match market fundamentals with technology fundamentals. New products and/or services that are developed under this approach will also have to answer the two key elements of manufacturability and serviceability.

Manufacturability is bringing the innovation beyond the prototype or sample. It means the new product or service can be replicated many times over. It means the raw materials are or can be made available at the desired quality, quantity and cost. It means there is a process that can consistently come up with the desired results. Manufacturability is making sure the product and/or service can be made or delivered in large volumes consistently.

Serviceability issues surface after the sale is made. This has a greater impact on products and less on service. It has reference to the after-sales service. If repair or a warranty claim is made, where can the customer go? If spare parts are needed, where are they available? Does it need special equipment and/or knowledge to maintain? Can it be fixed with simple tools?

Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of applying creativity without simultaneously considering the market and the technology for manufacturability and serviceability. On the one hand, when they only address market concerns, the product or service may be loved by the market but they will never be able to produce in volume and will just remain at the level of a cottage industry or a micro business.

On the other hand, when only the technical foundations are considered, the result could be a technically superior product that the market will not buy. It can be efficiently replicated but not saleable. (Your new product or service may be the answer to a question that nobody asked).

When manufacturability is not considered, it may not go beyond the prototype level. It may not be possible to scale it up to commercial levels. When serviceability is not considered, the product might sell once but customers will find out soon enough that there is no after-sales support and regret their patronage of the product.

At the Asian Center for Entrepreneurship, our student-entrepreneurs, no matter how seasoned, are being assiduously mentored to use their creativity to produce innovations in the marketplace. First and foremost, our gurus have to make sure that they understand the market and the fundamental technology of the business.

It is the thorough grounding on these two fundamentals that allows creativity to lead to innovation. Gurus assess each student-entrepreneur’s mastery of their markets and the technology of their business. An interesting finding is that there is no consistent behavioral pattern, since some student-entrepreneurs are masters of the market while others are masters of the technology. What is clear is simply that each student-entrepreneur has a mastery of one or the other. Depending on the assessment, the ACE guru mentors the student-entrepreneur accordingly and cautions him/her not to let creative juices flow without a sufficient mastery of the market and technology.