Inside the

Entrepreneurial
Mind: From
Ideas to Reality

Prepared by: Cheryl Y. Dulay


The differences among creativity,
innovation, and entrepreneurship
• creativity
• the ability to develop new
ideas and to discover new
ways of looking at problems
and opportunities.
• innovation
• the ability to apply creative
solutions to problems and
opportunities to enhance or
to enrich people’s lives.
• entrepreneurs succeed by
thinking and doing new
things or old things in new
ways.
Creativity—Essential to Survival
Transforming their organizations
into engines of innovation
requires entrepreneurs to cast
off the limiting assumptions,
beliefs, and behaviors and to
develop new insights into the
relationship among resources,
needs and value
Entrepreneurs must always be
on guard against traditional
assumptions and perspectives
about how things ought to be
because they are certain killers
of creativity.
Big business develop new ideas while creativity
and innovation are the signatures of small and
entrepreneurial business.

Peter Drucker “Innovation is the specific

instrument of entrepreneurs, the act that endows
resources with a new capacity to create wealth”

Kristina Holly “Big ideas are just that –ideas-until

you execute”

Ted Levitt “ Creativity is thinking new things and

innovation is doing new things”
Creative Thinking
 Barriers to Creativity
• Searching for the one “right” answer
• Focusing on “being logical.”
• Blindly following the rules.
• Constantly being practical.
• Viewing play as frivolous.
• Avoiding ambiguity.
• Fearing looking foolish.
• Fearing mistakes and failure
• Believing that “I’m not creative”
How to Enhance Creativity

• Enhancing Organizational Creativity

INCLUDE CREATIVITY AS A CORE
COMPANY VALUE AND MAKE IT AN INTEGRAL PART
OF THE COMPANY’S CULTURE
HIRE FOR CREATIVITY
ESTABLISH AN ORGANIZATIONAL
STRUCTURE THAT NOURISHES CREATIVITY
How to Enhance
Creativity

• EMBRACE DIVERSITY
• EXPECT CREATIVITY
• INCORPORATE FUN INTO THE WORK
ENVIRONMENT
• ENCOURAGE CURIOSITY
• DESIGN A WORK SPACE THAT
ENCOURAGES CREATIVITY
How to Enhance Creativity

• PROVIDE CREATIVITY
TRAINING
• ELIMINATE BUREAUCRATIC
OBSTACLES AND PROVIDE
THE SUPPORT NECESSARY
FOR INNOVATION
• DEVELOP A PROCEDURE
FOR CAPTURING IDEAS
• TALK WITH CUSTOMERS—
OR, BETTER YET, INTERACT
WITH THEM
How to Enhance Creativity
• MONITOR EMERGING TRENDS
AND IDENTIFY WAYS YOUR
COMPANY CAN CAPITALIZE ON
THEM
• LOOK FOR USES FOR YOUR
COMPANY’S PRODUCTS OR
SERVICES IN OTHER MARKETS
The Creative
Process

• Step 1. Preparation
getting the mind ready for creative thinking
formal education, on-the-job training, work experience and
other learning opportunities
Step 2. Investigation
develop a solid understanding of the problem, situation, or
decision at hand
• Step 3. Transformation
• two types of thinking: convergent and divergent.
Convergent thinking is the ability to see the similarities and the
connections among various and often diverse data and events.
Divergent thinking is the ability to see the differences
among various data and events
• Step 4. Incubation
• incubation occurs while the individual is away from the
problem, often engaging in some totally unrelated activity
• Step 5. Illumination
• This phase of the creative process occurs at some point
during the incubation stage when a spontaneous
breakthrough causes “the light bulb to go on
• Step 6. Verification
• validating an idea as realistic and
useful may include conducting
experiments, running
simulations, test-marketing a
product or service, establishing
small-scale pilot programs,
building prototypes, and many
other activities designed to verify
that the new idea will work and is
practical to implement
• Step 7. Implementation
• they act on their ideas. An
entrepreneur’s philosophy is “Ready,
aim, fire,” not “Ready, aim, aim, aim,
aim.”
Techniques for
Improving the Creative
Process

• Brainstorming
• small group of people interact with very little structure
with the goal of producing a large quantity of novel and
imaginative ideas
• As group members interact, each idea sparks the
thinking of others, and the spawning of ideas becomes
contagious
•Mind Mapping
•throwing out
ideas in a linear
fashion, the
brain jumps
from one idea to
another.
• Force-Field Analysis
• weigh both the advantages and the disadvantages of a
particular decision and work to maximize the variables that
support it and minimize those that work against it.
• TRIZ
• Developed in 1946 by Genrich Altshuller, a 22-year-old
naval officer in the former Soviet Union, TRIZ (pronounced
“trees”) is a systematic approach designed to help solve any
technical problem, whatever its source. The name is derived
from the acronym for the Russian phrase that translates as
“theory of inventive problem solving.”
• Rapid
Prototyping
• transforming an
idea into an
actual model
points out flaws
in the original
idea and leads to
improvements in
its design
Intellectual Property: Protecting Your Ideas

• Patents
• A patent is a grant from the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office
(PTO) to the inventor of a
product, giving the exclusive
right to make, use, or sell the
invention (and to prevent others
from making, using or selling it)
in this country for 20 years from
the date of filing the patent
application
• Trademarks
is any distinctive word,
phrase, symbol, design,
name, logo, slogan, or trade
dress that a company uses
to identify the origin of a
product or to distinguish it
from other goods on the
market
• company’s “signature”
in the marketplace.
• trademark can be more
than just a company’s
logo, slogan, or brand
name; it can also
include symbols,
shapes, colors, smells,
or sounds.