INTHEBLACK December - January 2022 - Magazine - Page 62
Everyday creativity
ELEVATE BUSINESS AS USUAL
62
DEC 2022
JAN 2023
TED Talk, The Way We Work – Rahaf Harfoush
How burnout makes us less creative
CLICK TO LAUNCH VIDEO IN A NEW WINDOW
BIG IDEAS, SMALL GAINS
“Disruptive innovation” is a concept developed
by the late Harvard academic and management
guru Clayton Christensen, and it is embodied by
companies such as Netflix, which began as
a humble DVD mail order business. The Big
Four accounting and consulting firms all pay
homage to Christensen’s ideas about innovating,
often giving employees licence to consider
the unconventional. PwC Ventures calls this
“internal creative destruction”.
Incremental innovation is a more common
approach, used by many companies to improve
business-as-usual processes and performance.
This ranges from deploying Zoom or Microsoft
Teams, through to automating timesheets and
expenses, and encouraging employees to adopt
new processes and solutions to make work more
efficient and streamlined.
The question for many firms is, do they pull
together a special innovation team or is
creativity open to everyone?
“I think you need a bit of both,” says Chua.
“A central innovation team that is a bit different,
run by people in jeans not suits, but also a
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“I can afford to fail fast, if I have
a clear vision, a broad innovation
portfolio and a mix of short,
medium and long-term goals.”
DARREN CHUA, EY OCEANIA
firm-wide culture, where everyone gets a chance
to be creative and play a part.”
The “jeans and T-shirt brigade” is highly visible
in workplaces such as Atlassian and Google, where
“innovation days”, “personal projects” or a “genius
hour” are set up to foster creativity within employee
ranks. The idea is to detach employees from their
day-to-day work and allow them to work on a
project of their choice, creating the space for
out-of-the-box thinking.
For an established business in a non-technology
sector, it is much harder to draw a link between
innovation and investment, says Chua. “At the end of
the day, the CEO wants to know, ‘What is my ROI?’
Innovation accounting is vital, yet not something that
is easily measured, let alone done well.”
