History of the Creatrix innovation Inventory

Background & History to the Creatrix Inventory

One of the primary motivations for developing the Creatrix Inventory, created by Dr Richard E. Byrd in 1974 and updated in 1986 and again in 2000 by Dr Jacqueline Byrd, was to measure the creative sense and risk-taking of individuals in organisations.

Research has shown that understanding the creativity and risk-taking of individuals in organisations helps us to better understand why one organisation stagnates and another takes an excessive risk and lands up in bankruptcy, and another is moderate to extremely successful.

Creativity is defined as the ability to think of new ideas.

Risk-taking is the willingness to push your ideas forward, even in the face of adversity.

While IQ may be a predictor of academic success and a safe bet for success on certain kinds of jobs, it provides no guarantee as to a person’s ability to make a uniquely fresh contribution to industry or to any other field of work. And while it’s true that we are products of our genetic and social origins, the difficulty is that we are most often in situations, which demand repetition rather than creativity, conformity rather than diversity.  These restrictions on experimenting with new ideas are imposed on most of us from early childhood.  In our jobs, we may be caught in a variety of “binds.  The company wants coordination, implementation and follow-through—pretty much in the same old ways.

An implicit assumption of this instrument is that over a lifetime people develop a general predisposition toward creativity and risk-taking.  Having no evidence to the contrary, The Creatrix Inventory allows individuals and organisations to benchmark their current levels of creativity and risk-taking.

Individuals and organisations often ask whether they can change their creativity and risk-taking orientations.  People sometimes find that they have an orientation that they don’t like.   Our answer is that we all have choices and understanding what drives your creativity/risk-taking propensities and what gets in your way of being more creative and taking more risks is what makes the difference.

The Creatrix Inventory provides individuals not only with their current orientation profile, Sustainer, Dreamer, Planner, Modifier, Practicalizer, Synthesizer, Innovator and Challenger, but clarity as to what drives that Orientation eg. the Seven Drivers of creativity and risk-taking.

To find out how you can use the Creatrix™ in your organisation or with your clients email us

References:

A personal Guide to Risk taking – Richard E Byrd 1974  (amacom)

The Innovation Equation – Byrd & Brown 2003 (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer)