Creative Reinvention – How these Times Will Change Business, Work and Your Life

At times of upheaval, creativity comes to the fore. It is the best tool for dealing with and successfully navigating unexpected change.

As the Covid-19 crisis unfolded and people desperately searched for a toilet roll on empty shelves in supermarkets, one community newspaper printed centre spreads with perforated sheets to solve the immediate problem. Okay, so it wasn’t a serious or long-term solution. Still, it doesn’t diminish the genius of their ability to understand their communities’ needs and respond to a problem that wasn’t theirs to solve, with exceptionally applied creativity.

The lean, not so mean, focused machine

Almost every business has taken a hit. While before the model of success was expansion, now businesses are dealing with contraction at an alarming rate. Practically, businesses will need to shed their excess:

• Products – underperforming product lines will be culled, and the focus and investment will be on the top 20% (the Pareto principle).
• Staff – there have been and will continue to be lay-offs – but employees are too valuable to lose too many. Employees who have dreamed of more flexibility have never had so much power to demand it. In fact, the old employment contracts are going to be ripped up. Employers need great quality work in the minimum amount of time. Employees need a certain amount of job security with the maximum flexibility, so they can pursue other interests including time out, side hustles and looking after their health and family.

Realising the value of values

We are realising the old way we were thinking about productivity was a con. We were producing more stuff, more waste, more churn and burn – with many of our efforts ending up in landfills and laying waste to the planet. But we don’t want to stop consumption. We need to keep money in circulation, while also being more considered about which activities derive the most benefits for everyone.

We all need to look at our offerings with a critical eye:

Which ones best align with our values and offer the greatest value to our customers? Can we streamline or simplify them, reduce their environmental footprint and service more people, more thoughtfully?

Premium and luxury with their blatant show ponying layered with more whistles and bells, more attachments and more accessories will need to evolve. Now, we’ll question why we pay so much more for stuff we don’t need. More care and more consideration have to go into our offerings. How can we do more with less, and better, is the new sweet spot. When it comes to marketing your items, the Instagram age of “look at me” is now dead – you have to communicate with substance again. Develop your campaigns considering what you offer and give back, rather than thinking about what you take.

Everybody needs good neighbours

Never before have people felt so neglected, alone and vulnerable. But it has its upsides. For the first time, we are getting to know our neighbours – not just their names but their needs. We now understand the importance of getting out of the rat race and just acting with a lot more care. It’s good for our neighbours and it’s good for us.

Brands and businesses need to show how they are tangibly contributing to:

• Making the community safer.
• Strengthening human connections.
• Reducing their environmental footprint.
• Contributing to helping others less fortunate rise up.
• Looking after our welfare – rather than just enriching shareholders.

Never have JFK’s words – ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country – been more relevant. If you want your employees to earn less, and your investors to expect less profits, then you need to be able to answer what you are doing in return.

It’s a very frightening idea – we have all been trained for so long to take and make more. Fundamental to our survival has been the notion to look after yourself first. But locked down in our homes, we have had to come to terms with how small we’ve become.

People don’t just buy goods, they buy good behaviour

We are finally realising it’s not what we have that defines us – it’s how we behave.

From your supply chain up, businesses of all shapes and sizes need to look at how you do business and who you do it with as it defines who you are.

• Do you have ethical contracts in place?
• Do you promote or discourage waste?
• Do you exploit the more vulnerable with the excuse being you do it to protect your profits?
• What kind of systems are you aiding and abetting – because it’s no longer excusable to say you didn’t know or when you are busted say you need to do better.

Your reputation is the most meaningful thing you have. Protect it and honour it with your life. Your future and continued success are dependent on it.

What does this mean for innovation?

A mutually beneficial mindset

Just as your communications and operations need to be revisited, so does your innovation strategy and pipeline. Previously, this has always come from a space of what can I produce/what do people need (the sweet spot)? Or who can we partner with and how to augment our offerings? Things like open innovation were trendy for a while, but they weren’t about democratising the market. Rather, it was to let others offer ideas or incubate solutions and when they were attractive enough either partner with them or acquire them with every company looking at the market and seeing how much of the pie they can own.

Now businesses would benefit by taking a local, village-like look at the market. What are the complementary goods and services you could partner with to increase your impact and support the community? Think less like companies and more like guilds – an association of people for mutual aid or the pursuit of a common goal. How can you take your innovation back to the people?

Run a more human race

Innovation doesn’t stop with your offerings – think about how you are running your business too. Work with your staff to find mutually beneficial ways they can work fewer days at their job, so they can spend more time in our community – coaching, teaching, training, baking, painting, crafting and playing. Our environmental footprint goes down and our quality of life goes up. 

A tech-tonic societal shift

Finally, the promise of technology can be realised. It’s not that it wasn’t always there, but we were using the tools to increase our reach and, ironically, increase our social distancing by measuring our value through the number of likes and connections we made. Now when we have to do social distancing for real, we realise that a small tight-knit community is the most important thing and our technology is about enabling connections as measured by our true closeness with one another.

A spotlight on innovation by industry

Food & Drink:

We have seen versions where we tried to automate the cooking and the front of house service and consumers were not quite ready for it. But people will be trying to minimise human contact with the products we consume and the demand for robotic solutions will rise.

Two examples are firstly, Samsung’s robotic kitchen assistant that aims to do all the menial cooking tasks. And, secondly, we have robotic bartenders from Yanu who can make between 100 and 150 drinks an hour. Both have been treated with scepticism, but this isn’t about replacing your high-end experience, more servicing busy environments like airports, nightclubs and fast food outlets where speed is more important than personalised service. And if you look a little deeper, you realise that the ambitions extend into creating an entire service robot sector. In a world where we will be increasingly concerned with hygiene, demand for these types of robots is set to increase.

Technology:

The race to improve how we use videoconferencing is on and these companies are leading the charge with some mind-blowing innovation.

Microsoft Holo Lens allows creatives to collaborate on detailed projects. Participants in the meeting can pick up documents and toss them across the room, and slap sticky notes on a prototype for engineering to fix later.

Less creative in its demo, and very likely coming to you soon, is the 3D holographic meeting. I don’t think we will need to be in suits around a boardroom table. I think we’ll be creative in our appearance and environment. Why not meet on a virtual beach wearing summery clothes even in the middle of winter?

Super exciting is Deep Frame. Ditch the glasses and the annoying headsets. Deep Frame enables 3D content on glass with a “resolution high enough to create a sharpness that is virtually indistinguishable to the naked eye”.

Retail:

In a world where we will increasingly be kept inside, retail will have to consider the delivery experience. Already, we have seen innovations in contactless delivery, and it will continue to be the norm. But what about the people still delivering our packages? Driverless delivery trucks, bots and drones are going to become a reality. For example, Postmates Serve – a delivery bot that runs small purchases to your door. 

Travel:

The appetite for travel will never wane, but how we do it is set to change. It’s too risky to venture too far and, increasingly, the world’s favourite destinations were already being crowded out. Air travel will go back to being a luxury as carriers can no longer offer cheap fares, so travel will have to come to us. Firstly, we’ll prioritise local locations and become explorers of our backyards. Secondly, when we want to venture afar, we’ll use technology to travel to places we may never, physically, set foot in. But the experience could be far better. No jet lag, no begging for time off work, no crowds and expensive hotels.

Instead, we’ll be able to go where we want, when we want by exploiting the immersive technology like VR and AR, which will continually improve. This will allow us to go places that were previously off limits to the public and, depending on which adventure option we choose, we can have personalised commentary and locals supplementing our travel giving us money-can’t-buy experiences at a fraction of the cost of the old way of travelling.

Or, even better, we can travel forever in a self-sufficient floating city. Not dissimilar to living on a cruise ship, but safer as it’s completely germ-free and you have all the comforts of home. You’ll be able to do everything you did at home, including work, and go wherever you want. “Solar panels and water turbines could generate power, a desalinatr would be stored under the main level to provide a water supply, and floating gardens could be used to grow food.” Not cheap, but worth every cent if you can afford it.

Medicine:

Introducing xenobots – are they robots, machines or animals? Xenobots are living, tiny robots programmed by computers that learn algorithmically. Lab-grown, pre-programmed life forms represent a major step forward in the pursuit of living machinery. “We are witnessing almost the birth of a new discipline of synthetic organisms,” Columbia University roboticist Hod Lipson, who was not part of the research team, told the NYT. “I don’t know if that’s robotics, or zoology or something else.”

For now, xenobots are extremely limited in what tasks they can perform, but they are also an extraordinary accomplishment and are a new scientific field that is emerging that’s potential is enormous. What if our machines could learn, repair themselves and then degrade back into the earth when we were finished with them?

Fashion:

We already had the world’s first digital supermodel and the world’s first virtual reality fashion show using avatars as models, and fashion continues to lead the way on how it satisfies our need to express ourselves.

But things also got a whole lot more real. We now know what real people look like. When no one has access to all their expensive salon and cosmetic beauty treatments, the playing field has been levelled. We all look, well, normal again when Botox and spray tans are not on the essential services list. After months of our income being depressed and not having to dress to impress, we’ll be more considered about what luxuries we’ll need in the future. But if we aren’t messing as much with our faces and buying expensive clothes – that doesn’t mean we will forgo our creative fashion sense. Instead, our home offices, our t-shirts, our filters and even our avatars will become our creative outlet where we express ourselves and make tech work for us (instead of working on our faces and bodies).

In search of insights for innovation?

In addition to running my own creative agency, I work closely with the team at The Creative Method as their Creative Strategist and together we can provide expertise and help to develop your innovation pipeline. To contact me at The Creative Method reach out to [email protected]