Self-evaluation of creativity and personal creative growth

Self-Evaluation -- Teamwork, Innovation, and Creativity

Business Creativity, Discovery, and Innovation

This course helped me appreciate the tremendous importance of creativity and open-mindedness in modern business. In principle, creativity has always been important in business because it is the ability to understand the needs of consumers and to imagine new ways to fill those needs that has always been the cornerstone of business. However, this course helped me understand a very important concept about modern business creativity: First, creativity in the modern sense has become much more important because of the pace of technological innovation and development. That means the contemporary entrepreneurial professional must understand the relevance of specific technologies that he may not necessarily know about in detail. He must be able to evaluate the ways that consumers are using various technologies (especially in digital media and communications) and to anticipate the ways that those new technologies will be capable of being used in the future.

In that regard, I have been guilty of failing to learn about the broadest range of technologies possible. I have read up on certain technologies that happen to interest me personally but not necessarily on many other equally important technologies that have great potential to support future business initiatives. Therefore, I have learned that I must broaden my knowledge base to include learning about more technologies that have business potential so that I will be able to anticipate potential business opportunities early enough to capitalize on them.

At the same time, I have also realized that the depth and rate of technological innovation with business potential may be too great for me to understand all of the different areas with business potential. Therefore, it will be important for me to establish and maintain close associations with colleagues who are subject-matter experts in strategically-chosen fields. Ideally, we will collaborate to develop a long-term vision of what we want to accomplish in business. Thereafter, each of us will help one another become aware of possible business application of innovations in our respective fields of relative expertise and we will be able to rely on one another to identify potential opportunities in specific areas based on our shared long-term vision and our individual areas of greater understanding.

Teamwork and Individual Commitment

To make such an arrangement work, I realize that I will have to continue working on and developing my teamwork skills. By nature, I tend to be very independent and self-reliant. While I appreciate those traits and know that they are advantages in many respects, I have also learned that they can be counter-productive in an environment where there is too much information for any one person to be responsible for understanding, especially in terms of making decisions that could have significant downside potential as well as upside potential.