Creativity and What the Future May Hold

Question 1

What types of innovation are there?

Answer 1

Three basic types of innovation are:

• Technical innovation: may involve creation of new products or services or new markets. Many technical innovations occur through research and development (R&D)
• Process innovation: involves creating a new way of producing, selling or distributing existing goods or services
• Administrative innovation: administrative innovation is the creation of a new organisational design that better supports the creation, production and delivery of products and services

Question 2

What is an intrapreneur?

Answer 2

An ‘intrapreneur’ is an entrepreneur within an already established organisation. Intrapreneurs can share the same traits as entrepreneurs such as conviction, passion and insight but without owning all the risk, it is the organisation that employs the intrapreneur that ultimately owns the risk.

Question 3

What is creativity?

Answer 3

Creativity provides new ideas for quality improvement in organisations and innovation puts these ideas into action.

Question 4

What is the sociology of innovation?

Answer 4

The sociology of innovation asks a number of questions:

• How do people create new technological inventions or scientific discoveries?
• Why are some innovations adopted immediately while others languish in obscurity?
• Why do some spread widely while others remain confined?
• How do people adopt to new things, and why do they sometimes resist them?
• What role do organisations, markets, and geography play in fostering or inhibiting innovation?

Question 5

What solution has been posed to the solciology of innovation?

Answer 5

Teresa Amabile:

Question 6

What is a futurist?

Answer 6

A futurist uses foresight to describe what could happen in the future and, in some cases, what should happen in the future.

Many times a final product of a futures project is not important. The key outcome is that during the process of exploring the future, participants are deeply engaged and become aware of how to see the future for themselves.

Question 7

What is a futurists analytical process?

Answer 7

• Framing – understanding the current state of affairs
• Scanning – looking for indications of the future
• Describing – explaining or reporting on possible futures
• Visioning – opening the range of possibilities
• Planning – creating/implementing a future direction

Question 8

What may the future hold in 5, 20 and 20+ years time?

Answer 8

Within 5 years

Current developments will see robo-advisors introduced. Some UK banks are already planning to launch these in the very near future.

Within 20 years

The only ‘face to face’ meetings with bank personnel will be for problem resolution, more complex requirements such as large scale business or corporate lending, and those face to face meetings may be done via hologramatical representations with a human being in a different part of the world.

Beyond 20 years

An aging population.

In 25 years’ time, will we still need physical cash or cheques? We have already reported that Britain is now a cash-second economy.

Will national currencies still remain? What about a single one-world (electronic) currency? Who would control it?

Nobody really knows what the medium to long term future in banking holds with any real degree of certainty.