BUSINESS INSIGHTS
technology and creativity . But Cambridge doesn ’ t create new professorships on a whim . There ’ s clearly more work to be done .
Crunch time
And talking of work , divided attitudes to science and the arts are alive and kicking in the business world . We know because we ’ ve researched this exact question , and our findings suggest it ’ s holding some firms back .
Businesses , of course , measure their very success or failure through numbers , so it ’ s no surprise that the lexicon of industry is shot through with terms like liquidity , ratios , margins , inflation and weighted averages , language that could have been lifted straight from a science textbook . And the current AI revolution means there ’ s never been a better time for businesses to be crunching numbers in the hunt for insights and opportunities .
You might think , then , that the more a business embraces data and applies scientific rigour to decision-making , the more successful it will be . But it turns out that it ’ s actually businesses prepared to embrace imagination and creativity who can be most confident of delivering growth in the turbulent times we ’ re living through .
We surveyed 500 decision-makers across the UK and the US to assess how their businesses foster and invest in behaviours and processes aligned to creativity and imagination . Of those businesses whose answers identified them as highly imaginative , 58 % said their revenue had grown considerably in the last 12 months , and 63 % said they were performing significantly better than their peers . At the other end of the scale , 92 % of the least imaginative companies reported declining revenues , with the same proportion reporting little or no confidence in their resilience .
These figures are a stark reminder that no amount of data analysis – artificial or otherwise – will come up with a genuinely new idea . At best , it ’ s going to fine-tune
Ben Bush , Partner and Head of Strategy , The Frameworks
what you ’ re doing already . At worst ? Ask Blockbuster .
The best business leaders get this . They also recognise the risk and discomfort creativity in business can bring . In Business Stripped Bare , Richard Branson wrote : “ Business is creative . It ’ s like painting . You start with a blank canvas . You can paint anything – anything – and right there is your first problem . For every good painting you might turn out , there are a zillion bad paintings just aching to drip
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