Strategy Needs Creativity.

When business school students are taught strategy, they dutifully study mapping the five forces, for example, and drawing a value net, but they know that game-changing strategies come from somewhere more creative. To generate groundbreaking strategies, executives need tools explicitly designed to foster creativity. A number of such tools already exist, often in practitioner-friendly forms. They take their inspiration more from how our thought processes work than from how industries or business models are structured. Thus they can help strategists invent a genuinely new way of doing business. The author explores four approaches to a breakthrough strategy: (1) Contrast. Identify— and challenge—the assumptions undergirding the status quo. (2) Combination. Connect products or services that seem independent from or even in tension with one another. (3) Constraint. Look at limitations in an organization and turn them into strengths. (4) Context. Consider how a similar problem was solved in an entirely different context—surprising insights may emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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