Greg suggests that there are many ways that creativity can manifest itself in business: from business strategy to product design to a clever marketing campaign. He states that a successful business requires creativity in all aspects of its operations.

Transcript



What's the role of creativity in the business that I've worked with? So, there are lots of different ways that creativity happens in a business. I personally, though it sounds hard to believe for people around me, consider myself to be an extremely creative person. My creativity manifests itself in business strategy. I can take a company I think that is plain vanilla and turn it into a platform for doing more interesting things. I think that's what we're doing with Glu, that's what we did with 3Dfx and that's what we did essentially with myfamily.com which is a very small company when I got there but we acquired four companies and made it a much more interesting company. So, you can be a creative business person just in the deals that you do and the way in which you envision your business. You can be creative in product ways. And I think the people who come up with great ideas, whether it's the iPod or TiVo or replay TV are among the most creative people in our society. They may not be writing on a literal canvas, but they're writing on a virtual canvas by creating those products. Even engineers who were sitting down to do code are expressing creativity in the way in which they write that code. There's no correct way to write code. There are a lot of different ways to write the same code and the creativity of an engineer could be manifested in the way they choose to write that code. Marketing people, the creativity expresses itself not only in the look and feel of a particular campaign, but in the way in which they approach the strategy of their marketing approach. What are you doing that is different than anybody else has done before? When we launched Ice Age 2 as a mobile game on a worldwide basis, we broke all the rules of what had happened in the mobile gaming business in the way in which we did that. We didn't spend a single dime and yet we had carriers all across the world spending millions of dollars advertising Ice Age 2, because they wanted to get close to that brand and they use our game to do it. So, I think creativity is almost everything in business. And if you don't think you're creative, you probably have it somewhere in your gene pool and you'll find if you're lucky the right place to have that creativity come through.

1. Great Products Aren't Enough
2. Value of Customer Service
3. Treat Everyone with Respect
4. Agree and Commit, Disagree and Commit
5. Follow Your Values
6. Work Life Balance
7. First to Market
8. Creativity in Business

In this lecture, Greg Ballard talks on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students on November 15, 2006. Greg suggests that a good product is a solid foundation, but not enough to guarantee success. He illustrates his point using the examples of Betamax, and his own experience in competing with NVIDIA.



Course Details:

- Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture

- Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner)



Original Course Name: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture.