The question of how companies can link the logical and creative sides of their business is perennial. Neil Hooper has some suggestions.

As businesses strive to achieve distinction in competitive markets, innovation is set to be high on the agenda this year, but the question stands: how can business leaders ensure they cultivate an environment to encourage innovative practice? In what has been a very slow process of discovery, company heads are finally seeing the link between creativity and success, yet are at a loss as to how to implement it within an established way of working.

Furthermore, creativity can be an intimidating or unfamiliar territory; it is seen as risky or hard to define, and businesses will often put up natural barriers to it. However, it is becoming more and more apparent that in order to survive and remain ahead of the game, businesses need creativity just as much as financial stability.

The most successful businessmen are able to see the link between the logical and the creative within an idea and work confidently with both to strive for, and eventually accomplish, innovation. Take Richard Branson, for example. He is creative genius, but also a great businessman. Creatively he sees the bigger picture, but he has the business acumen to use logic and creativity to complement one another, without viewing them as two separate parts. If you’re a business leader, you need to ascertain which members of staff or clients are more logically minded and which are more creative.

In terms of the way our brains work, we are either logical, systematic and analytical (left side) or we focus on intuition, creativity and holistic thought (the right). The key to innovation in business is to work with these in harmony and determine the way your staff and clients think. This method means you can create a language that works for both parties in order for each to clearly interpret and understand the other. In very creative yet also extremely practical businesses like RPM, I have trained the business in understanding the way that people interpret creativity, so that when we are pitching to our clients, they are able to clearly track back our creative idea to a consumer insight, product truth and of course the original brief. It’s about translating creativity into a manageable, logical journey and encouraging questions from whoever it may be that we are presenting to. You must involve them in your creative journey to enable them to wholly understand the idea and its origins.

It’s key to remember that businesses do not always need to be able to implement creativity themselves; it can always be directed via an external creative agency. However, the key for businesses is in the understanding of it. Creativity is a calculated risk and businesses need to see it this way, as opposed to avoiding the experimental and sticking with more familiar ways of approaching a brief. Some of RPM’s most exciting and groundbreaking campaigns were born from innovative thinking.

Take the recent Sail-in Cinema project we did for Talisker. We wanted to create a unique experience for consumers to engage with the brand that would have huge PR reach and would make Talisker famous in the sailing community. It was a risk - no-one in the world had created one before, so we had nothing to base the experience on. How would we know it would be successful? Would consumers like the idea? And with a limited audience capacity, would it get us the return Talisker was looking for? The results were clear that innovation works. We created a world-first event (beating Toronto’s attempt by four days) that truly captured the imagination of the sailing community. The world-first concept was picked up as a news story by some of the UK’s biggest titles including The Daily Mirror and The Metro, and 168 pieces of coverage were achieved in total, reaching an audience of 171 million.

If you have belief in the unfounded and support your staff to share this vision, you will start to reap the benefits of creativity’s fruitful rewards.