In a corporate context, companies have to try very hard to oppose the enticements of conventional wisdom. They must aim for the leaps, which means that companies have to do more than simply manage their knowledge, which is composed of the insights and understandings they already know. They also have to manage the knowledge-generation process. It's not just about, "Oh, we're going to create a data warehouse and we are going to invent a computerized filing system to get at all the stuff we know."
John KaoConducting a creativity audit can be very illuminating because it can tell you how the process is working internally and against the competition.
John KaoYou would not let your kids do whatever they want. So the challenge is to create accountability in a non-mechanistic way. You cannot come in with a clipboard and check off boxes and figure out why something has not been done on schedule.
John KaoAll of these creative ideas and decisions about new ways to reach the consumer can be tracked with regard to how well they are working, whether and how they are building awareness for the product, how well they motivate the consumption of the product, and so on.
John KaoIf you come up with a new product, you can very easily track its contribution to the bottom line. But often the challenge can be both large and subtle.
John KaoThere are some pretty obvious ways of benchmarking creativity. One way is to perform what I call a creativity audit, which is to look at your capabilities and look at your performance and examine the percentage of revenue that comes from products that are less than five years old, less than three years old and that are current with the present accounting period. You can then compare those figures to those of your competition along the same axes.
John Kao