The Creative Class -Richard Florida

Richard Florida is an economist and author of the global best seller The Rise of the Creative Class. His latest book, Who's Your City?, is also a national and international best seller.

Florida’s works have paved the way for his provocative looks at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy.

He is a regular correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a regular columnist for The Globe and Mail. He has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and The Harvard Business Review. He has also been featured as an expert on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, NPR and CBS to name just a few.


About Todays Webcast

How the Creative Class is Affecting the Way Businesses Think.
Now more than ever, companies need unconventional thinking to work within the new rules set by the economic recession. Richard Florida has persuasively demonstrated how artists, scientists, engineers, writers, musicians and more can revitalize an entire city from urban decay. With today’s companies in a similar situation, what can members of the Creative Class do for businesses? We will discuss where your new hires might come from and the impact they can make.


Overview

The term "creative class" does not refer to art school graduates working day jobs in coffee shops. And while it does include creative pros, such as art directors and designers, the "creative class" is more than a creative department. It’s what social theorist Richard Florida describes as "people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content."

In the recession-minded "new normal" economy, business leaders may want to look to the creative class – and its talent for creative problem solving – for lessons about how to add value, save resources and improve quality.


The Creative Class in the 'New Normal' Engaging the Client

According to Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind, creativity is something that can be learned and enhanced. “Companies can actually enhance the creativity of their people. And leadership can do a lot of things to create a creative culture – one that encourages people to take risks and find creative solutions. It requires encouraging experiments and lessons from failure. Employees should be encouraged to take risks, and know that it's ok to fail as long as you learn from this.”

Adam M. Grant, professor of management at Wharton and an organizational psychologist, says, “Most creative professionals have a particular end user in mind.” Often the end user is a client of the business, he says, but the end user could be a coworker or anyone else who uses the product. “When you connect creative professionals to the end users,” says Grant, “when they hear the needs those end users have, that encourages the creative professionals to empathize with the end users and find practical ways to help them.” The satisfaction gained from finding a solution to the end user’s problem is often a reward unto itself.

But making that connection isn’t always easy. According to Grant, a lot of creative people don't get to see the impact of their work or meet the end user. And that’s unfortunate. He offers an example from the technology realm. “If I am designing software programs, one of the things I need to do is gain an understanding of the user’s perspective, watch how they use software and tailor my design to how the end user actually works. But a lot of organizations don't establish that connection between employees and end users.” Establish that connection, he says, and designers will add value by creating more useful products.

Open Innovation and Technology

Professor Wind adds that a great deal of a company’s creative class innovation may come from the outside. “You realize from the beginning that not all ideas will come from inside. So you open yourself to the outside – including customers – in solution design.” He calls P&G a pioneer in open innovation. “They get about 50% of their products from outside P&G. It used to be much smaller. Even with a 9,000-person R&D group they could not deliver the innovations they needed.”

Wind points to another example of open innovation, this one in advertising: “Look at what's happening in user-generated content.” Wind says that the most effective TV commercial of the last Super Bowl was the ad for Doritos, which was developed by consumers. “This came from a culture of innovation,” he says. “The more you create such a culture, the more you engage customers in the solution, then the higher the likelihood of coming up with more valuable solutions to them and to the company as well.”

Innovation in technology is especially important in the U.S., says Wind. “We historically believe we have the dominance in R&D and innovation. But we're losing that dominance. In China and India they are developing sophisticated high-tech products. Singapore has a government office of creativity. It focuses on innovation, communication and creativity.”

Identifying and Optimizing Creative People

Creative people breathe life into their organizations. They inspire those around them. So, how can management learn to identify and tap an organization’s creative problem solvers? According to Darren Rowse, vice president at blogging network b5media, highly creative people display a number of traits – curiosity, for one. Creative people tend to ask how, why, and what if? Creative people tend to confront challenges, not run from them. They believe that no challenge is too big to be overcome. And creative people persevere. When the going gets tough, creative people keep going.

Rowse and other creative professionals believe that smart managers should look for these traits among their people. When creative people are identified they should be given more opportunities to solve problems. Whether making difficult tasks easier, dangerous jobs safer, or complicated programs simpler, creative problem solving can add value to practically any organization, especially today.

According to Adam Grant, “We're moving from an information age to a conceptual age. We need more creative professionals who can identify new problems and solve them in ways that haven’t been considered before. “Research by Teresa Amabile at Harvard and Sigal Barsade and Jennifer Mueller at Wharton shows that positive emotions can drive creativity. Enthusiasm and excitement often drive good ideas; these emotions make us more cognitively flexible. We tend to make more connections between different kinds of ideas, and see things from different angles.”