Creativity and the Entrepreneur

....in the long run no really subtle, deep, and far-reaching problems can be solved in any field whatsoever, except by people who are able to respond in an original and creative way to the ever changing and developing nature of the overall fact by which they are confronted." (Bohm, 1998). Creativity can lead to many initiatives which are relevant to the development of business. This paper begins to explore the relationship between creativity, marketing and the entrepreneurial process. INTRODUCTION The creative soul can lead to a new packaging design for a washing powder or, perhaps more sublimely to an artist creating a painting. Creativity can be messy, unexpected, a mystery, or merely frustrating. Popular writers like de Bono (1996) attempt to reduce creativity to the logic of self-organising information or patterning systems. Sources of such creativity can be found in innocence, experience, timed judgment, chance, accident and even madness. Being creative is seeing the same thing as everybody else but thinking of something different. Often by combining existing objects in different ways a new purpose can be discovered. For example, Guttenburg took the wine press and the die punch and produced a printing press. Another way of looking at creativity is as playing with the way things are interrelated. The surrealist painters are often effective in juxtaposing two or more unrelated objects in order to create a tension. Within this tension is the source of the creative spark. If for example one considers Magritte’s painting “Time Transfixed, 1939” (Figure 1) then it helps to illustrate this point. Why is the locomotive coming out of the chimney? On its own a locomotive is nothing new to us. It creates no mystery. However in choosing to depict it in a fireplace Magritte creates a mystery which raise questions and possibilities. Entrepreneurs and even academics as they play with ideas are seeking to create and then explore the mystery. It may be that nothing comes of it but by taking part in this process one is exposed to the possibility of creativity.