Creativity and Sociology

Thinking sociologically requires imagination and insight, to identify and explain social mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness.
Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, communities, or societies. Sociology brings much more depth to our knowledge with an interdisciplinary understanding of creativity, business, and even an entire human society. Because the key elements in creative activity are often socially based and developed, hence, sociology can contribute significantly to understanding and explaining human creativity often as the collective activity. Thinking sociologically requires imagination and insight, to identify and explain social mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness.




Sociology helps to identify and explain the social mechanism of creativity: A sociological mind has an interdisciplinary understanding and in-depth knowledge about business and society in order to connect dots for sparking creativity effortlessly. The best we can individually do is to start breaking chains of habitual thinking, perceiving, willing, and feeling, to cultivate the digital mindsets with interdisciplinary knowledge and imagination to spark creativity. Collective creativity derives from sociology. Creativity has a language, but it is altogether different from the one found in the traditional workplace. Generally speaking, you must allow room for failure, for tangents, for being "different." Encourage people to question the status quo and think independently and create an environment that encourages dissent and candor for developing and amplifying collective creativity.

The democratization of creativity: Divergent thinking, creativity, and ideation are all interrelated. Through social learning and development, with the right methodology, creativity can be cultivated through positive reinforcement. One good example of the democratization of creativity is to experiment with open innovation which involves bringing in ideas from outside and welcome anyone to apply or contribute from the wider community. You will get different types of ideas internally and externally and if you want to profit from both of them, you have to have a good open innovation platform, program and culture ready. The goal is to maximize the invaluable inputs to find the best ideas and its market impact and profit. Design an organization, that is a sociotechnical system to digitally connect key resources and assets in their vicinity, context and build the resource-rich innovation hubs or clusters across the business ecosystem to nurture creativity.

People-centric innovation: Sociology studies humans and their relationships. Fundamentally, creativity is about generating novel ideas to solve human-related problems. Innovation is the managed process to achieve the commercial value of ideas. Often, innovation happens at the intersection of people and technology or people and business. Focusing on people needs should be the right path to grow innovation fruits. The only test for whether it is or is not innovation is whether it makes any difference to a dimension that is valued by whoever has a stake in your offering. Thus, studying sociology and bringing up the outside-in view is critical for nurturing people-centric innovation because you need to understand how consumers encounter, observe, or undergo their stage of experience, and then, come out the innovative ideas to delight them. To put simply, people must be the center of innovation.

The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is dynamic, holistic, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, creative, and resilient with hybridity of knowledge, processes, workforce, and competencies. It’s important to apply sociological discipline to cultivate the culture of creativity and develop a suitable and hybrid (physical + virtual) environment for stimulating and measuring the originality and creativity and scaling the business innovativeness into the differentiated business competency.

Posted in: Connecting Dots,Creativity,Systems Wisdom