COEUR: A focus on Business Creativity

Transcription

1 COEUR: A focus on Business Creativity Ladies and Gentlemen COEUR: A focus on Business Creativity This virtual conference is introducing a new, more: an innovative concept to the European Higher Education Area, the. BCM OnLive virtual conference 11 th April 2008 Brussels I admit this is not fully true, as talking of an innovation normally includes the successful market introduction of the product and we are just at the beginning of this dissemination process. Nevertheless we firmly believe that this process will in the end achieve the success we assume and with the feedback from our customers some hundred students from 6 European universities in the last 4 years we have good reason to do so.

2 The concept of COEUR Competence in EuroPreneurship - is new in three respects which can be understood as the three pillars it is built on: The COEUR-Basis Process orientation First: A change in the way how people successfully organize their business activities: After putting focus on changing bottlenecks: Trade industrial production and finally the customer the orientation of the future will overcome the dominant end-of-pipe-thinking and will focus the potentials of the entire value-adding process! Second: An increasing significance of an emerging European entrepreneurship culture not only fostered by a strengthening of European selfconsciousness Euro- Preneurship Business Creativity Experience creativity and entrepreneurial learning in intercultural teams - a new European Dream to use the words of the American economist Jeremy Rifkin - but recognizing European diversity as a strength and not as an obstacle in terms of global competition! The last and final but by no means least pillar is formed by the concept of Business Creativity which I will exclusively talk about in the following analysis.

3 I want to start developing the concept from a basic model of idea management which builds on a distinction between The Business Evolution Process Idea Management and Business Planning a creative phase in which ideas will be developed Creative or Divergent Phase Analytical or Convergent Phase and an analytical phase which leads to the selection of one ore more ideas. Idea-Generation Idea-Evaluation Implementation! As many ideas - at the end of the process - will prove not to be economically viable manageable or adaptable to the company strategies or culture a great number of ideas is needed. This phase can be characterized by divergent thinking, not accepting traditional boundaries but going beyond existing explicit or implicit limits.

4 The creative phase is followed by an analytical or convergent phase in which the ideas will be evaluated in order to find out the one ore more ideas that finally will be introduced into the market to grow successfully. The evaluation process may start with experience based, frequently implicit criteria like customer potential and benefit company-competence or a rough estimate of the capital needed. In stepwise iteration more complex measures are taken into account, evaluating the attractiveness of the idea finding cross-impacts between options and technologies finally leading to an evaluation of the most interesting ideas in terms of business indicators like profit, pay-off-period, return on investment and the like. In recent years this last phase anticipating future action and economic results - has very successfully been elaborated in terms of the concepts of Business Planning as vital prerequisite for the acquisition of finance The Business Evolution Process Idea Management and Business Planning Creative or Divergent Phase Idea-Generation Analytical or Convergent Phase Idea-Evaluation Implementation! for a start-up or expansion projects. Business Planning

5 The model developed so far shows, that there are a number of open questions which require special attention in order to develop a more comprehensive and balanced understanding of the process of sustainable evolution of an enterprise. First of all The Business Evolution Process Idea Management and Business Planning The non-trivial problem to define the task at the beginning of the divergent process Creative or Divergent Phase The non-trivial problem to define the task at the beginning of the divergent Idea-Generation process Analytical or Convergent Phase Implementation Idea-Evaluation Business Planning! which at first sight seems not to be more that an academic bubble or sophistry. Transferred into everyday language the question sounds simple: What is the problem? THIS trivial as it might appear - is absolutely essential in our context. Talking about creativity, business people frequently expose themselves to the danger not to be taken serious. Creativity in the world of precise figures seems to be a suspicious phenomenon which can hardly be understood and not controlled in any way. Nevertheless the basis for this suspicion is not more than a misunderstanding or imperfect perception.

6 Two different types of creativity have to be distinguished Creativity At first artistic creativity which enables people to create a poem, a piece of music, literature or a unique picture on a blank sheet of paper Free, artistic creativity Problem solving creativity on the one hand and, secondly Problem solving creativity which helps us to find new solution-patterns for problems, which have not been structured before, opposite to intelligent problem solving which applies existing patterns on well described problems. Problem solving creativity will be the exclusive subject addressed here. The precise formulation of the problem which should be solved, is the most important prerequisite for the choice and application of creativity techniques. Empirical evidence shows that many start-up companies in their business models claim to solve customer problems which at the end of the day, definitely nobody has. The consequence is following quickly and with rigidity: bankruptcy.

7 The second question which needs to be answered is whether a formal equivalent to Business Planning can be defined, The Business Evolution Process Idea Management and Business Planning Creative or Divergent Phase Analytical or Convergent Phase delivering quality indicators for the formulation of the problem integrating different methodologies and aspiration levels of a comprehensive process and structuring proposals in a way which enables them to start successfully into the commercialization phase of Business Planning. The non-trivial problem to define the task at the beginning of the divergent Idea-Generation process The question of a formal equivalent to business planning in phase I Business Planning! In analogy to this well known term we called this phase Business Creativity Business Creativity in the context of an evolutionary and self regulating model of business does not only mark the beginning of the process, it also plays a crucial role in the necessary feedback loop, in re-inventing the business model: Once a business has successfully been set-up and is developing well, today there is only little justification just to proceed with business as usual, relying on the strategic advice: Never change a winning team. The Business Evolution Process Idea Management and Business Planning The question of feedback out of the running process the evolution of the firmcreative or Divergent Phase The non-trivial problem to define the task at the beginning of the divergent Idea-Generation process The question of a formal equivalent to business planning in phase I Implementation Idea-Evaluation Analytical or Convergent Phase Implementation Idea-Evaluation Business Planning!

8 The reason for this to be found in the phenomenon of change itself. Change is a very old phenomenon which has already been described by ancient Greek philosophers like Heraklit or Plato. The creative challenge we are facing today stems from two different sources: The speed of change is dramatically increasing and which is even more important Change is acquiring a new quality In general three types of change can be distinguished which differ in their dynamic attributes, type of adaptation and the category of knowledge needed to make a company successful: Change: Determinants of Success Behaviour, Knowledge and Change-Categories Change Deterministic System- Dynamics Rigid Type of Adaptation Reaction, Execution Knowledge- Category Factual Knowledge Stochastic Dynamic Proactive Adaptation Behavioural Knowledge Deterministic change Open Chaotic Creative Leadership Structural Knowledge Stochastic change and Open change Since the works of Isaac Newton we are accustomed to categories of deterministic change. Everything is predetermined, systems are rigid and as soon as the attributes of the system are known (factual knowledge) it is easy to (re-)act to control the system and direct it according to the aims pursued.

9 Operating the light switch turns the light on or off, starting a car makes the engine run and pressing the break pedal unless any unforeseen damage interferes - clearly has the result that the car is slowing down. This is the world of machinery or mechanistic, sometimes beaurocratic systems. The world of markets can be classified as stochastic system. The result of the process is not known in advance but actors are able to come to a judgment of probabilities on the basis of experience or marketing research. The ice-cream vendor before going to the beach on the morning of a summer day may just look out of his window to get an impression of the actual whether or he may have watched the weather forecast the night before. Based on this experience or marketing research he will decide mostly in sufficient quality how much ice-cream to take to the beach in order to solve his dilemma neither to run out of stock, nor to have a surplus amount, which he might have to dispose when returning in the evening. We are very familiar with both these situations and we have developed a number of (more or less flexible) planning methodologies and action patterns to cope with them successfully. Change: Determinants of Success Behaviour, Knowledge and Change-Categories Change Deterministic Stochastic System- Dynamics Rigid Dynamic Type of Adaptation Reaction, Execution Proactive Adaptation Knowledge- Category Factual Knowledge Behavioural Knowledge Open Chaotic Creative Leadership Structural Knowledge The future problems which appear as writing on the wall do not result from these categories of change but from open change.

10 There is little chance to classify or estimate open change in advance. None of its attributes like starting point starting time direction or intensity of change can be described or evaluated ex ante, they only can be judged while the process is proceeding or when it has finished. Open change may equally be initiated by technological or social innovations leading to new products, services, processes or institutions of which nobody can know, why, when, where or how they appear. This is a situation when neither facts nor experience help to guarantee sustainable development but only the capability to be prepared for the unexpected and to find creative solutions in a new unexplored field of action. What makes this knowledge so important for our future is the circumstance that open change in any of the forms mentioned is quite common in our actual living situation and increasing. The American futurologist John Naisbit obviously was right when he claimed that we are changing from a managerial society into an entrepreneurial society. The Business Evolution Process Business Development Creative or Divergent Phase Analytical or Convergent Phase Problem Definition Idea-Generation Implementation Idea-Evaluation?! Those who will not be able to adopt to these changes may at worst share the destiny of the dinosaurs, being big and powerful but a disappearing species! For that, I think, the capability of creative problem solving will become one of the core competencies for the future! Business Creativity Business Planning

11 COEUR is offering a very general platform for various activities around EuroPreneurship. Despite that scope of possibilities, COEUR at the moment exclusively focuses on the early phases of the business evolution process and seeks to develop the most important natural resource Europe has: creative people. The way how COEUR in general and the COEUR Business Creativity Module in particular are operating is to bring students from European universities together to let them work in an open atmosphere of creativity and innovation to let them be the owner players of the process. We do not want to teach them right or wrong. We want to encourage young Europeans to spread their wings and fly, to follow their dreams. We want to empower them to describe what they feel to be valuable in the future and not just to repeat the old recipes of parents and teachers. Working out a value proposition thus is a first step on the way of a colorful Europe of regions which is not afraid of its divers differences but proud to use them to improve.

12 But the idea of COEUR is not just ambitious and it is not a mere vision. The participating universities are also very much realists which do not believe that a project firmly supported by 6 of them will have enough power to achieve the aims pursued. COEUR: A focus on Business Creativity BCM OnLive virtual conference 11 th April 2008 Brussels As for organisational reasons it would not make sense to try to grow the network to a number of for instance 20 universities it would simply not be manageable any more the development strategy was not focused to follow the idea of quantitative growth, but of network multiplication together with strategic partners like the Junior Chamber International JCI Europe, with whom we very successfully cooperate in this field since the first COEUR Conference in Mainz in the year This is the basis of the virtual conference which today introduces the product COEUR BCM to a broader public to encourage any other university in Europe - without limitation of nationality, type, size or faculty - to profit from our experience and to build up COEUR networks of their own. We would be very happy if you accept our invitation to take part in COEUR BCM and welcome you to join the new interdisciplinary and intercultural networks to support the idea of Europe as a creative entrepreneurial space! Thank you very much for listening.