How Can You Tell What Type of Creativity Your Organisation Has?
Organisational creativity generally falls into four types: product, process, marketing, or business model innovation. Copying another company's approach without knowing your own type is a common reason initiatives fail. A few honest questions about recent wins and resource allocation can reveal where your organisation naturally leans, and knowing your type helps you invest, communicate, and build on existing strengths more effectively.
Many organisations try to copy the creative culture of well-known companies, for example by designing modern-looking office spaces, allowing casual dress, or running weekly brainstorming sessions, yet the results never quite match expectations. One common reason is that the organisation never took the time to understand its own creative “style” first, and ended up borrowing methods that don't fit its own context.
This article explores the different types of organisational creativity and how to identify where your organisation currently stands.
How Many Types of Organisational Creativity Are There?
Creativity at the organisational level isn't a single, uniform thing. Each organisation tends to have different strengths depending on its industry and internal culture. In general, it can be grouped into a few broad categories:
- Product innovation focus: organisations where creativity is driven mainly through continuously developing new products or services
- Process innovation focus: strength lies in finding new ways to work or run internal systems more efficiently
- Marketing innovation focus: creativity shows up through how the organisation communicates and presents its brand differently
- Business model innovation focus: creativity is centred on finding new ways to generate revenue or deliver value
An organisation may show strength in more than one type, but usually one stands out more clearly than the others, depending on its industry, team structure and accumulated culture.
How to Identify Where Your Organisation Stands
To identify which type of creativity your organisation leans towards, start by considering these questions:
- Over the past one to two years, which area has driven the most impactful change in the organisation: new products, new processes, marketing campaigns, or a new revenue model?
- Which team in the organisation is most often talked about for having “great ideas”?
- When facing a business problem, what's usually the organisation's first way of solving it?
- Where do senior leaders place the most importance and allocate the most resources?
The answers to these questions will start to reveal the organisation's creative direction. That said, self-assessment through these questions alone can carry hidden bias, so it's worth pairing this with a structured assessment tool for greater accuracy.
Why Knowing Your Own “Type” Matters More Than Copying Others
One common mistake is adopting another organisation's methods without considering the different context. For example, an organisation strong in process innovation may not need to pour budget into marketing-focused idea generation activities the way another company does. Instead, it should focus on strengthening its existing edge or developing the specific areas it's lacking.
Knowing your own “type” first helps an organisation:
- Invest in the right skills and activities, rather than wasting time and budget on things that don't fit
- Communicate a clear, unified creative direction to employees across the organisation
- Build on existing strengths rather than starting from scratch
An Organisational Assessment That Identifies Your Creative Type
Accurately identifying an organisation's creative “type” requires a tool specifically designed to measure at the organisational level, rather than a general satisfaction survey. A good assessment should capture perspectives from employees, managers and senior leaders alike, to build a well-rounded and realistic picture.
The results of this assessment become an important starting point before the organisation moves on to the next stage: planning how to encourage and develop creativity in the most targeted way.
In Summary
Knowing what type of creativity your organisation has is a key step before beginning any serious development effort. It allows you to choose an approach that fits your own context, rather than copying another organisation without knowing whether it's actually the right fit.
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