When you jump out of an airplane for the first time, the instructor has their hand on the lower part of your back. If they push you too hard, you will stiffen up and perhaps panic. If they don’t have their hand on your back, you probably won’t jump either. Only gentle pressure will keep you moving towards the door and make you jump at just the right time.
I’d like to suggest that fostering a creative culture through mobile collaboration requires a similar steady and persistent guidance from business leaders. Today we have mobile, cloud and AI all colliding with the millennial generation’s new approach to work. Together, they create tensions that can be paralyzing, especially for team leaders or employees less comfortable with technology.
Many organizations have made changes aimed at nurturing creativity, including renovating work spaces, introducing flexible hours, or instituting skip-level meetings. But fewer have made a concerted effort to push forward mobile technology training, best practices and tools to unlock creativity and collaboration across the enterprise. They may be missing out on considerable upside, as hinted at in our recent study with Frost and Sullivan in which employees estimated smartphones increase their productivity 34 percent.
By the very nature of our business, companies like Samsung have no choice but to innovate, and we also benefit from a forward-thinking workforce that is enthusiastic in adopting new mobile collaboration technology.
For our enterprise customers — CIOs and line-of-business leaders — harnessing the full potential of mobile means a steady hand to spur creativity in their own ranks. The key is to not push too hard, and to ensure the governance, device management and security protocols are in place to remove potential roadblocks and mitigate risk for a soft landing.
Jumping Into Innovation
Consider the Galaxy Note8, our newest phone, designed as a mobile tool to do bigger things in work and in life. Since our first Galaxy Note device back in 2011, it’s been the smartphone for doers and achievers. With every new edition, our focus has been on enabling new productivity features that allow business users to be more efficient and impactful.
I’m convinced the Note8 is our best business smartphone to-date, with its 6.3″ infinity display, advanced S Pen and innovative new features like App Pair. This last feature lets you simultaneously launch two applications on a split screen; imagine for example, accessing calendar and phone, or a webex and messenger together. The S Pen is a powerful creativity tool that allows you to write, annotate, sketch ideas and precisely control everything on the device.
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It’s a phone that will significantly expand any employee’s conception of what mobility means. It’s an experiential trip into a world of new possibilities, stimulating and exciting, rather than terrifying and paralyzing.
Time and again, executives fall into the trap of thinking that creativity and innovation come from some magic formula or some top-down initiative. In reality, they grow out of little things that matter, such as having a colleague who builds on your ideas and encourages you to do the same for them; enough free time and freedom to experiment; being praised for taking a risk instead of criticized for failing; gaining access to one or more experiences that spark your creativity.
Harnessing Creativity and Collaboration
A while back, I came across a Forrester report called The Creative Dividend. In it, Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile said, “Creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas in any domain.” You can be creative in the way you configure an assembly line, reorganize a sales force or serve the needs of your customers. Mastering this elusive art is valuable regardless of your industry or function.
Yes, we need many of the elements that thousands upon thousands of people have written about creative cultures: To move faster from talk to action, to shift from closed to open systems; to lead instead of follow, and to replacing the “impossible” with the “possible.”
But it’s simpler than that. We need to better understand the value of a gentle but firm nudge in the right direction, applied consistently and in a trustworthy manner. Mobile collaboration — especially with innovative technologies — can serve as such a nudge. It shows creativity in action and provides positive examples of what’s possible.
See how the Samsung Galaxy Note8 can help you and your team do bigger and more creative things with their mobile.
