Longitude Sound BytesEp 04: Obstacles vs expectations | Laura Huang – by Claire Wang (Listen)

Laura Huang, professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Edge: Turning adversity into advantage, Boston:

Hi. I am Laura Huang. I am a professor at Harvard Business School, and I currently live in Boston.

In terms of creativity, I think creativity is very much about patterns and stories and narratives. In this way I think it is very three dimensional, rather than a two dimensional concept. And what we think about creativity has changed a lot in the years past, especially because we are so socially connected. Instead of using constraints and obstacles to make us more creative, we instead tend to look to others and their solutions, which entirely limits our creativity. But in fact, so much of creativity is in constraint.

So an example what I mean by this is…you know, a lot of work looks into entrepreneurship, a field where you need a lot of creativity and innovation. What we have seen a lot of recently is the cropping up of a lot of corporate incubators. Incubators, where companies like Microsoft and Intel and Google will have an incubator that is their own. And within these incubators they will be trying to have startups that originate, startups that are able to answer some of the questions that they are looking to answer, come up with technologies that might be useful for them for the future and this is a great way for them in-house to be able to support the types of technologies and innovation that they need.

The problem is that these startups, what they have found over time is that these startups do not have the constraint in the same ways that other startups do. These startups know that they are getting funding from their companies, so they are getting funded by Microsoft or Intel of Google, and they don’t have that same kind of hustle, or that same type of constraint where they need to be creating a product that lots of people want. Instead they are trying to tailor their product what they think Google, or Microsoft or Intel want. And by doing so, they are actually less creative and less innovative.  So having some of that constraint, having some of those limitations, those obstacles are sometimes what actually enable creativity.

Claire Wang, Longitude fellow, Rice University, Houston:

What Professor Huang said about creativity really reminds me of having to write essays for class.

More often than not, someone before you has written about what you’re trying to write. When you’re stuck, the first thought that comes to mind is probably, ‘well what did other people write’. The truth is, we really do like to look at others for inspiration! But once we see what others have done, it often becomes much harder to come up with our own ideas or think for ourselves.

And like the corporate incubators, with school it’s also easy to fall into the trap of writing what you think your instructor or professor wants you to write based on previous lectures and discussions in class, and that in itself limits your creative capacity.

So maybe if we added some constraints, if we put ourselves in a smaller box, maybe it becomes easier to think outside of the box. Perhaps it’s time we become a little bit more deliberate and courageous with facilitating creativity. At a certain point, we should reflect and be honest with ourselves: are we fostering, or are we limiting, our own creativity?

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