Tag: creativity

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How small business and creative industries thrive off each other

(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)
(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)

Small businesses are not an island on their own. They coexist and thrive with their surrounding environment. While some people have been wary of the creative industries in communities and cities perhaps they have not given enough thought to how small businesses thrive in these environments.

A city that is leading the way in combining artists and entrepreneurs who are wanting to make a difference through their start-up firms founded on creativity, innovation and digital technology is Berlin in Germany. A recent newspaper report indicated that the creative industries in Berlin employ over 240,000 in the city alone. These industries include clubs, gaming, fine art, performance arts, city development, music, TV, radio, form, newspapers and magazines, books, communications and advertising agencies, design and fashion. Continue reading “How small business and creative industries thrive off each other”

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Five creativity techniques to help you in your personal life and business

 

"Riverwalk Marketplace" shopping mal...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The seed of success for most things in life — personal relationships, health, business, community — is creative thinking. It doesn’t matter if it’s thinking disguised as intuition, decision-making or problem-solving.

Creativity helps you come up with more imaginative ideas, do something new and different and even profit from your ideas if they are materialised into products and services.

Continue reading “Five creativity techniques to help you in your personal life and business”

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How can you learn to be more creative?

Mind-map showing a wide range of nonhierarchic...
Mind-map showing a wide range of nonhierarchical relationships (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Small business owners, start-ups and entrepreneurial venture founders use idea generation and creativity in coming up with a new business idea whether that be starting something from scratch or taking a second-hand business and repurposing it for a specific target market. Once the small business is up and running, the small business owner would typically deal with a number of difficulties, problems and challenges – all of which need creativity to be solved. Continue reading “How can you learn to be more creative?”

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Wake-up your creativity

When you mention the word creativity in conservative circles you may feel ashamed like it’s some sort of dirty word. Creativity is smothered or kept safely under lock and key in command and control organisations and institutions. Why? Perhaps because the new, the novel and different is scary to the traditionalists. Like oil and water creativity and business aren’t supposed to mix.

Yet is this true? Is it really the case? Is creativity so far removed from business? Continue reading “Wake-up your creativity”

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An often ignored way to ignite creative sparks

(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)
(Copyright © 2015 by Chesney Bradshaw, all rights reserved)

A young entrepreneur with a start up came to me recently to discuss how he could improve and grow his business. Like many other start-up entrepreneurs, he had been struggling to come up with new ideas and new approaches to solving problems and challenges in improving his value proposition to potential customers.

We spoke about many areas of his business, his customers and the market for about two hours. When we finished we had drawn up a brief checklist of actions he needed to follow up.

Continue reading “An often ignored way to ignite creative sparks”

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Firing up the workshop of your imagination

English: An elderly at stretching exercises in gym
English: An elderly at stretching exercises in gym (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been trying to get back into running after a long absence. I had to drop out in the winter because of a calf injury I suffered one morning running below 0° with out doing warmup stretching exercises. The doctor said I could get back into running after three weeks but a friend in Cape Town who has gone into running in a big way said it would take 10 weeks. Guess who was right? The runner, the one who has knowledge of the road.

I practised walking for about two weeks before I took my first run. When I went out running the run seemed smooth flowing. But a few minutes after I got back I could feel the spot where the old injury was and my muscles were sore. The next day my muscles were so stiff that I took a break and went back the next day. Not everyone is interested in running, I realise, but it provides an excellent analogy for other areas in our lives such as our imagination, which is really the workshop of our minds in which all new ideas, concepts and solutions are fashioned. Continue reading “Firing up the workshop of your imagination”

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Does walking spark new ideas for you?

IMG_1434.JPG.storyboardOn Sunday late afternoon I took a walk along the Braamfontein Spruit watching the baby ducks that had grown up during the summer months. I went up to the bird lookout at Delta Park which overlooks a field of bulrushes where small finches were eating the seeds in the setting sun.

During this walk an idea that I hadn’t thought of for a while slipped into my mind. I tossed it about and came up with a potential market for the product, a name for varieties of the product, how to package it and what I would have to do to test market it. By the time I’d finished my walk I had a reasonably developed idea, much more feasible than when I had first thought about it. Continue reading “Does walking spark new ideas for you?”

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When you’re stuck for ideas, try these three questions

FIRE!!
FIRE!! (Photo credit: Thomas’s Pics)

The experts will tell you that if you want to create new ideas all you need to do is get out a pen or pencil and stare at a blank sheet of paper and write down your ideas.

Has this ever worked for you?

I’ve found that it’s very difficult unless you come prepared to you blank sheet and at least have some questions in hand that can spur your imagination. Continue reading “When you’re stuck for ideas, try these three questions”

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Shift your creativity into higher gear

Breeede River, Western Cape
Breeede River, Western Cape (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A woman from the UK landed up in the town of Worcester in the Western Cape and decided that she wanted to make the town her home. What ideas do you think she came up with to make an income that would enable to live in this scenic town in South African wine lands? Scroll down to the end of this post to see the answer.

What makes this number unique?

8,549,176,320

Find out the answer when you scroll to the bottom of this post.

For some people brain teasers like this seem silly or even stupid. Yet the point here is that they show how we are all faced with challenges and need to solve them through creative thinking. The answer to the women who landed up in Worcester in the Western Cape wasn’t solved overnight by her. She would have taken much longer to work out how she was going to make a living for herself, perhaps for many years, compared to the answer to the number poser, which you may have already solved yourself. Continue reading “Shift your creativity into higher gear”

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Does starting a business make you an entrepreneur?

Limonadedmg
Limonadedmg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day I saw this article that add the following headline “Starting a business doesn’t make you an entrepreneur: study”. The piece made this claim as a summary to a study by two Swedish academics from an industrial economics research institute but quite frankly got the whole thing wrong.

What these two Swedish academics were really saying was that when the rate of self-employment in the country is high, the rate of billionaire entrepreneurs is lower. When they compared for correlation between the presence of billionaire entrepreneurs and the rate of self-employment in a country, they came to a surprising conclusion: countries with many successful entrepreneurs had lower rates of self-employment.
Continue reading “Does starting a business make you an entrepreneur?”