The idea of creativity receives plenty of lip service in the corporate world. Many businesses say they would love their employees to come up with original ideas that bring a flood of new customers and open new markets. Some aim to provide the right incentives for those ideas to bloom, with varying success.
Spicing up the workplace with competitive energy is often seen as a way to unleash creativity. Just look at how many leaders use sports analogies to try to motivate their workers.
But it’s important to set the dial just right on competition, or innovation will go by the wayside, according to a recent study by Daniel P. Gross, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
First, though, how do you define and measure such an amorphous concept as creativity?
“Social scientists have coalesced around a definition of creativity as the act of producing ideas that are novel and appropriate to the goal at hand,” Gross wrote in his paper, titled “Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production.”
He then sought to quantify creativity by studying commercial logo design competitions, where a sponsor’s favourite design wins a prize.
“You go to one of these websites and you immediately see creativity in action,” Gross said in an interview.
Participants receive feedback ratings from clients as they progress with their work, and they also see the rankings of other designers — making these competitions a kind of petri dish of creativity in action. At various points, workers can decide whether to produce an original design, tweak an existing one or stop investing new energy in their logo altogether.
An advantage of this type of tournament “is that it incorporates tolerance for failure by allowing players to recover from unsuccessful experimentation,” Gross noted in his paper.
But there are limits. From observing 122 such competitions, Gross found that when many qualified people are competing for a prize, it becomes hard to stand out, and people tend to stop exerting creative effort.
On the other end of the spectrum, “When a designer is out in front with a good idea, they might take that idea and make a few tweaks, but they don’t have an incentive to experiment with radical changes,” said Gross, who will become an assistant business professor at Harvard this fall.
Gross’s conclusion: Some competition can spur people to create original work, but too much or too little can put the brakes on creativity.
“When you put it all together, you find that originality is greatest in the presence of one or two competitors of similar abilities,” he said.
The lessons from his research could apply not only to competitions like these but also to managing creative talent in the workplace generally, he said.
Gross cited the wisdom of a former professor of his who drew an analogy between competition and gardening. “You want to scatter your seeds widely to see what sprouts,” Gross said. “You shouldn’t try to make a thousand flowers bloom, or they’ll all turn out to be weak.” —NYT News Service
You shouldn’t try to make a thousand flowers bloom, or they’ll turn out to be weak
Daniel P GrossPostdoctoral fellow, Harvard Business School
