ROI of
Creativity Development
Creativity in leadership is linked to financial success. According to a recent McKinsey study, creative leaders outperform their peers on key financial metrics:
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67% had above-average organic revenue growth.
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70% had above-average total return to shareholders (TRS).
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74% had above-average net enterprise value or NEV/forward EBITD
These insights are corroborated by another McKinsey study, which shows that the fastest growing companies are particularly strong at developing new products, services, or business models.
According to LinkedIn, creativity is the most important skill for a business to cultivate. The research states:
"As AI continues to become a bigger part of this world, process-driven jobs are becoming even more obsolete. No longer will companies pay people to do the same task again and again; robots can likely take on those tasks. Instead, companies are most interested in new, better solutions. If you want to “future-proof” your [company], stop settling for solutions that worked previously and push yourself to think of newer, better ideas."
Organizations neglecting to foster internal creative habit will be outperformed by competitors seeing proven ROI from their creativity training. Terry McGraw, CEO of The McGraw Hill Companies, considers creativity training a “business imperative” and credits his company's success with “surfacing creativity” through consistent engagement with the arts. He claims, “The arts have served as a complementary vehicle to more traditional learning approaches. They have helped to change attitudes by letting employees confront their assumptions in a non-traditional and non-intimidating environment.” (Journal of Business Strategy, Seifter, Buswick, 2005)
Adobe’s study, State of Create 2016, presents an abundance of data advocating for the investment of creativity cultivation in the workplace. In summary:
Brief case studies of companies that invest in creativity:
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Frito-Lay was able to save $500M over a 5 year period by implementing creativity training.
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A two-year creativity course at General Electric resulted in a 60% increase in patentable concepts.
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Participants in a Pittsburgh plate glass creativity training showed a 300% increase in viable ideas compared with those who elected not to take the course.
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Several thousand employees of Sylvania took a 40-hour training course in creative problem solving, and the company reported generating a $20 profit on each dollar spent for the training.
J.D. Couger, who compared the ROI of creativity training with other investments, discovered that the return on investment of creativity training dramatically exceeded generic R&D programs and could be as high as 300%. (Source: Elias G. Carayannis, Jean-Jacques: Leading and Managing Creators, Inventors, and Innovators.)
