Once upon a time, I saw how a painter worked! Painters will pour various ideas that they have on the canvas so that it becomes a beautiful painting. Being a great painter requires creativity. Like painters, becoming a great entrepreneur also needs creativity and innovation. Innovation is created because of high creative power. You need to remember that creativity is not the same as innovation. In the world of entrepreneurship, creativity refers to the discovery of new ideas and insights, while innovation refers to how to use new ideas and insights so that they can make money.
When it comes to creativity, have you ever heard of Bill Gates? Bill Gates, founder, and CEO of Microsoft, often says he’s not an innovator. Bill Gates also doesn’t want to be a leader in software development, a high-risk business with an unpredictable future. He prefers other companies to come up with innovative ideas and test their marketing. If successful, Microsoft will also try to get their technology, or develop products for similar applications. Bill Gates claims that because of this kind of thinking, his company started from the beginning of a very simple, basic style and has developed into a dominant software developer, while he became the richest man in the world.
Bill Gates is a very creative person, who knows how to apply creativity to various market development techniques. The famous contract with IBM to develop MS-DOS was what brought Microsoft from a regular small-scale software company to a major player. In that contract, Bill Gates creatively found a way to serve IBM, while retaining the licensing rights of his “operating system.”
In hindsight, many analysts claimed that it was pettiness from IBM to let Bill Gates walk away with the contract. Maybe pettiness is a factor. But if we project back to the early 1980s, very few people would have the vision to recognize the importance of software and even less growth in its potential. Bill Gates was a creative man who proposed some sort of contract for IBM, and IBM thoughtlessly accepted the offer. Bill Gates is a very creative marketer.
Another story about creativity in the entrepreneurial world is the Apple computer. This Apple story sets an excellent example of the ups and downs of the creative process. Apple, as we know, has big ideas and consumers love their computers that are simple and easy to use. “Desktop” is one way they organize material on the computer with the garbage that can be for cleaning.
One day, Apple got into trouble. Technical ideas are far-sighted over time, but their managerial and marketing approaches are stingy, not matching current concepts. They also did not make the operating system widely available, so others could create programs that could be run on their computers, which increased the demand for their computers. Great struggle and creativity did bring Apple back. However, Apple will in turn fall again into red ink.
Through the competition between life and death, Apple was forced to go back to the drawing board and create something new, better, and then the Macintosh series was born. The birth of this series provides a revival for Apple that for some time they were looking for. Yet, again, especially through ego battles, the creativity that is holding back Apple, and losing its market share. Then the red ink flows freely. With its creator, Steve Jobs, Apple is back as the company that is almost ready to meet new technology.
The story of Bill Gates and the Apple company proves that creativity and innovation are the main heart of entrepreneurs. In short, for entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity are things that need to be owned and developed by entrepreneurs for the development and success of a business. Between creativity and innovation is sometimes viewed almost similarly. Essentially an innovation in the effort is the ability to apply creative solutions to problems and opportunities to improve or to improve business performance. Creativity can be viewed as the ability to develop new ideas and to find new ways of looking at problems and opportunities.
Creativity is the ability to make something new in its existence and is the formation of new ideas that are original and unusual or unique. The mindset of a creative person is to think out of the box, as well as have an open mind and be free to approach things in new ways. Meanwhile, innovation is implementing creativity towards something into a new combination that can produce. The new definition here does not always mean original, but novelty or renewal, which means also an improvement, because innovation does not always have to be new goods or services, but rather an improvement or development of existing goods or services.
Business development requires innovation and creativity skills to face challenges in business, especially to find superior products and services. Many products and services produced by successful businesspeople are the results of innovation and creativity developed in the business. Therefore, to become a superior entrepreneur requires the ability to innovate and create. In short, innovation plays an important role in the development of business products and services.
As outlined earlier, various entrepreneurial success in the world is caused by creativity in developing products. Intense competition in entrepreneurship encourages entrepreneurs to have high creativity. This creativity must be based on advanced ways of thinking, new ideas, and differences when compared to existing products. Creative ideas generally cannot be limited by space, form, or time. This creative idea provides breakthroughs in the business world, which at first seem impossible.
Currently, various innovation results based on entrepreneurial creativity become superior products and services. Entrepreneurs through creative and innovative processes create added value for goods and services which then creates a variety of advantages including competitive advantages. Companies such as Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Toyota Motor, and other global companies are examples of companies that are successful in their products — because they have creativity and innovation in technology.
Well, you may ask whether one’s creativity and innovation is a talent from birth or something that can be learned? The author argues that creativity and innovation can be trained. Back to everyone, whether the person concerned wants or is not committed to creative and innovative abilities? Hopefully, this short article is benefited.
