The focus of this assignment is "The Role of Creative Thinking in Business". The reason that this topic is important in business is because a lot of companies nowadays rely on their managers to apply Creative Thinking to their job to help the organization strive in stature. The role of Creative Thinking in business allows the organization the ability to ‘think out of the square’, this in turn, gives the organization the freedom come up with better quality products to appease the consumer market and at the same time to reap the benefits of our ever changing economy. In a bystander’s point of view, Creative Thinking in business is interesting, just by looking at the different way companies come up with products and slogans to entice the consumer, saying their product is the ‘in’ thing as well as the best product on the market to date!

Creative Thinking can be defined as the ability to imagine and to invent something new in an organization. Creativity is defined as the ability to imagine or invent something new, it is not the ability to create something out of nothing but the ability to generate new ideas by combining, changing or reapplying existing ideas.

In this essay, my aim is to discuss how "The Role of Creative Thinking in Business" is evident in managing a successful business. I will be referring from the articles given as well as information attained through the interview.

Creative Thinking asserts that it can be described as qualities of good thinking processes and as types of thinking. To simply explain what Saunders have to say, is that some creative ideas are brilliant and astonishing, whilst others are just simple and practical ideas that no one had thought of before. The point to literate here is that humans of all ages have substantial creative ability. A creative person acknowledges the fact that there is always room for improvement, so they continually work hard at their ideas and solutions to come up with what they think is the best solution at that point of time. The creative person is never satisfied with the end product and is always making gradual alterations and refinements to their work. It has been said that in certain companies, inventions have been taken away from the inventor in order to market it otherwise they would have just kept on tweaking it and fiddling with it, just to try to make it a little better each time. The philosophy that creative thinkers believe in is that "there is no such thing as an insignificant improvement" and there is always room for improvement. As quoted by the late Winston Churchill, "perfect solutions of our difficulties are not to be looked for in an imperfect world". Therefore, any problem which has been previously solved can be solved in a better way!

When comparing the opinions of my interviewee Ms E. Gomez to the opinions of the literature text, there is a clear presence of similarities on the topic of Creative Thinking in Business. According to creative thinking is really important in today’s market because, it (it refers to the market & competition) is constantly changing and it fluctuates on a constant basis. Producers churn out millions of dollars in research to try to make the better product over their competitors’ product. As quoted by Thurow, L, "Natural resources have dropped out of the competitive equation. A good example would be NOKIA formerly known as Oy Nokia. In the olden days, Oy Nokia a Finnish company best known for its toilet paper and galoshes, has become a leading player in the global cellular phone market in recent times. With successful risk taking and creative thinking, Nokia has surpassed the likes of Motorola & Ericsson to become a telecommunications superpower. As quoted by Toffler, A "change is not merely necessary to life – it is life", to which Nokia has successfully lived by to become a leading telecommunications superpower.

We can see this in virtually all the companies in the market today. Let’s take Microsoft for example; before the company was sued by the American Government for anti-trust, Microsoft’s products had already gained a strong foothold in the market so when the charge was announced, the only thing affected was the stock price and not the product legality. Bill Gates once said; "Microsoft is a company that manages imagination", had it not have been for Creative Thinking, Bill Gates would not have become one of the richest people in the world. Consumers find it hard to veer off using Microsoft’s Operating System – Windows for it has already set a benchmark in the market by offering a wide range of pre-installed applications which come with Windows giving users the convenience of not connecting to the internet to search for compatible software to download. One particular program is the Internet Explorer; Microsoft just blew Netscape "out of the water" when Bill Gates announced to the public that an internet browser would come with all pre-installed Windows Operating Systems. This just proves my point that Creative Thinking is important in business because it gives the companies an edge over their competitors. In our ever changing market, a company cannot just stay stagnant on one product; they have to research and make it a better product compared to the predecessor. If the company allows the product to stagnate, it would definitely be the downfall of that company. Take Rover the British car company for example, although they did try to follow the trend of updating their technology, they did not succeed! All this happened in the last century, luckily, BMW came to the aid of Rover and bought over the company. Although, Rover is still not progressing as much as everyone would want, it is slowly getting up there among the top producers of cars. The cause of the downfall was due partly to the fact that the company did not have enough market research and didn’t understand why the cars had such high breakdown rate as well as low sales. Fortunately, all this problems have been sorted out and Rover is now slowly climbing back up the transportation ladder. To stress my point that Creative Thinking is important, another example of a company which was on the brink of being ousted out of the market by its competitors is Apple Computer. Although Apple has been around for a long time and had shown no signs of ‘aging’, there were serious cracks in the infrastructure of the company after Steve Jobs was ‘given the golden handshake’ from his post in 1987. What happened to Apple after Steve Jobs was that Apple took an almost immediate downward spiral because they had no creative insight of how the company should progress. In 1996, Apple decided to hire Steve Jobs back as the CEO. Ever since, Apple has released a new trend of computers, which not only look good but also has released a more powerful micro-processor chip compared to the Intel Pentium micro-processor chip. Apple’s new chip runs at an average of 3x faster than the speed of the Intel Pentium chip, which is welcomed by many users in America, especially those in the music and film industry. Apple too has managed to incorporate Microsoft software into their already user friendly Operating System! In the last year, Apple recorded an annual profit of over US$36 Billion, all this, thanks to the ingenuity of man called Steve Jobs. Therefore, I conclude that creative thinking is highly important to businesses.

Creative Thinking can best be acquired through school, but it is only a minority part of that one can learn in school. Creative Thinking is natured through daily practice! According to, there are five proven methods on producing creative results. The second method is called Synthesis, "with this method, two or more existing ideas are combined into a third, new idea". The third method is Revolution, "sometimes the best new idea is a completely different one, a marked change from the previous ones". The fourth method is Reapplication, "to look at something in a new way. Unfixate, remove prejudices, expectations and assumptions and discover how something can be reapplied". The last method is Changing Direction, "many creative breakthroughs occur when attention is shifted from one angle of a problem to another. This is sometimes called creative insight". As for Ms Gomez, she agreed that higher learning institutes do help the student nature the student’s ability, but only in a certain way.

My personal plan for developing Creative Thinking skills is to try and put creativity to practice everyday, by having Creative Thinking blend in with my everyday life, I should be able to develop my creativity in no time at all. For instance, lay six stick matches on the table and make four equal sided triangles out of them". By adopting the "think wild" technique, I should be able to accomplish the task at hand and at the same time, improve my mental capacity.

In closing, I have basically just underlined the importance of the role of Creative Thinking in business. Creative Thinking is the key to being successful in this day and age of our ever changing turbulent economy. Organizations nowadays give their employees much more freedom to express their thoughts. This freedom equates to companies having their productivity doubled or even having their annual profit doubled all because an employee came up with a brilliant idea. Companies are increasingly hiring consultants to come in to motivate and teach the managers how useful and beneficial Creative Thinking can be for them as well as for the organization as a whole. Once the managers have learnt the ‘art’ of Creative Thinking, it is up to them to put whatever they have learnt down on paper and show the Top Line Managers for all their worth. Apart from being able to think creatively, Managers must also ‘train’ his/her lower colleagues in using Creative Thinking in their daily job routine.

My personal opinion is that, without Creative Thinking in the workplace, not only will the workplace be a dull and gloomy place to work in, but also have a very low moral rate amongst the employees. Creative Thinking can make or can break a business; it is just how one uses Creative Thinking to its favor.