You need judgment, you need to utilize conventional resource-allocation analysis, you have to work backward from estimations of the market to the current investments and you have to do some benchmarking of your product and its potential against your competition.

There 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.

Creativity is the crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value

The impresario function is about intervening with the company's more administrative management structure. It is about trying to establish a sense of boundaries and budgets and milestones and so forth on a project that does not necessarily lend itself to milestones. It is about translating between the intimate interior environment of the creative work team and the company's need to make money. And finally, it is about positioning the fruits of the creative process in the marketplace and selling them.

Performers may play in the studio, but they need to go out and tour every once in a while to keep their edge, or a performer who is a stranger may be asked to "sit in" on a set.

Creativity is not like the weather: You can do something about it. And you can measure it well enough to determine its effect on sales and profits.

Obviously businesses do not operate like an artists' commune. Business involves deploying finite resources to achieve goals in a competitive environment to make money. That is something creative people understand.