ONE day a visiting dog bolted down the driveway from Andy Keats’s Norfolk kennels. As the dust cloud settled, so did an idea. The dog’s owners, from Essex, were going on the Broads for a week and had intended to visit the dog each day and go walkies. Instead they had to abandon their plans, go back to Essex, and wait to see if anyone called their home phone number, printed on the wandering mutt’s tag. Keats, meanwhile, spotted an opportunity.
Ten years on, Petsafe, which offers a central number for finders of lost pets to call, has a million members, employs 29 staff and is, says Keats, “doing very nicely”.
The value of a good idea is inestimable and in a high-pressure, global market, companies need creative people, says Neil Laver, the group marketing director for Microsoft. “Without them, faster companies will eat your lunch.” But not too many creative types. Microsoft divides businesses into two categories, depending on how they operate. “Left-brain businesses are logical but more rigid,” Laver says, “while right-brain businesses are more creative and potentially more chaotic.” The key is balance. Get that right and you have genius, according to Microsoft’s theory of “business IQ”.
Laurie Stephens, head of people development for the IT and management consultancy Capgemini, agrees that companies can be too creative. “The risk of a creative environment is that you can continue to develop products and get caught up in them without selling them to your clients.” Yet businesses are demanding more ideas and greater creativity from companies like his; technical competence is no longer enough, he says.
So how do you get the ideas to flow? Hardware helps — better communication, for example — as does the right workplace. The “innovate centre” in Capgemini’s HQ is a flexible space, with moveable walls and an ambience that fosters creativity. “We help clients to build that kind of space themselves,” says Stephens. “It goes down a storm.” Then there are the softer, cultural elements that creative companies need, such as flat hierarchies, “where the foot soldiers feel they can come and give us their ideas”, Stephens says.
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And how do you spot a good idea? “I just sort of know,” says Richard Wiseman, psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire. “If you know the domain well, you have a feeling. And good ideas are ‘sticky’ — they make other solutions look bad.” But he is unconvinced that British businesses are becoming more creative. “What I see is businesses moving towards conformity.” Creativity means taking risks, not conforming, he says.
Andrew Hardwick, a senior teaching fellow at Warwick Business School, agrees that British companies still lag in the creativity stakes. “When I run a creative session, students see it as fun, then say: ‘We couldn’t do that in our business.’ But unless you have a source of ideas, your business is not going to grow.”
Keats says that his wife is tired of him waking at 3am and jotting down ideas to make his business grow. But his nocturnal activity has paid off. Petsafe grew into Keepsafe — extending the central-number-to-call concept to include personal property such as keys and phones.
And the dog that ran away? It turned up in a barn two days later.