Unlocking a Culture of Creativity with Technology

As organizations are planning for the “New Normal”, the one thing that will determine whether they are leaders or laggards in the post-COVID world is their ability to innovate and come up with new ways to engage with their customers. “Business as usual” just won’t suffice anymore.

Every organization has an underutilized asset that they can leverage to fuel these innovative solutions — the creativity of every employee.

Often, when we think of “the creative types”, we instantly think of musicians, dancers, and writers. We equate creativity with being artistic and bucket people into “the creative types” and “the analytical ones”. However, creativity is a natural part of human thinking and behaviour. It’s about unleashing this creativity that already exists within every individual and empowering them to put this into action every day.

So how can you build a culture of creativity that taps into this asset and fuels innovation?

Creating Time for Creativity through Automation

Creative O’ Clock, yet? The first and biggest hurdle in the path of creativity is the operational overload and the lack of time to trigger creative thinking. A common cause is the number of repetitive tasks that constitute an average employee’s workload. A study by McKinsey emphasized on how nearly half of the activities carried out by workers across sectors could be automated with existing technology. If you automated these activities which constitute nearly 50 per cent of their workload, you’re empowering them to use their time and energy towards more creative tasks that can help reinvent processes and products.

If you’re looking at starting off with an easily implementable and low-investment solution for this, RPA may be the answer. RPA is one of the least expensive AI Technologies that typically brings a quick and high ROI. Power Automate has introduced RPA capabilities with UI Flows which is GA worldwide, allowing organizations to automate their legacy apps and manual processes through UI-based automation.

From Blank Page to Creative Ideas with Data-driven Insights

Creative ideas are often based on the realization that there’s a problem that needs a solution. However, we tend to arrive at our problem statement with certain assumptions we make about our audience or environment.

Having a strong backing of data through the creative process can help bridge the gap between some of our own preconceived notions and the ground reality. When attempting to dig deeper, employees must be empowered with a searchable knowledge base to find relevant inspiration that can spark innovation. It’s also of importance here to have these insights and knowledge base built on top of unified data to provide a holistic picture and hence the journey starts with restructuring and modernizing data itself. After all, “AI is only as powerful as the data it’s built on”.

Unified Data Platforms like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights serve as excellent examples of how unified customer data across the full range of sources can unlock powerful business insights. A single view of customers in real-time that can support different business functions and provide insights for innovation is just what employees need to go from a blank page to creative ideas backed by data.

A cherry on top is the creative confidence that such data backing can provide. “Show me the data!” We tend to hear this often when we propose an idea or solution that’s contrary to common belief. When you have data to back up some of your unique ideas, you get the confidence to go and talk about it to a larger audience and the audience perceives your ideas differently as well.

To make sure employees go from blank page to creative ideas and not doodles, it’s important to set them off in the right direction.

Putting Ideas into Action with Low-Code Platforms

They have had the time to be creative and have come up with a brilliant idea backed by data. But, how can they put this into action?

Ideas for digital transformation can come from across your organization but it’s not always possible for the person to go ahead and take a shot at building on it — often owing to the lack of developer skills.

This is when the democratization of technology plays a big role. Today, we have a variety of low-code platforms that allow citizen developers to go ahead and build apps on their ideas and automate entire workflows — without writing a single line of code.

G&J Pepsi-Cola’s transformation through Microsoft’s low-code platform, PowerApps, serves as an excellent example of the same. A team of employees that did not classify themselves as developers, went ahead and created a suite of applications that ended up saving the company thousands of dollars. The fact that they weren’t “developers” didn’t stand in the way of turning their brilliant ideas into amazing apps.

The “New Normal” cannot be built with old ideas. Organizations must unlock the creative superpower within every employee with the perfect sidekick — Technology.