What’s Your Business Innovation Moneyball?

It’s hard to read much about 21^st-century sports history at this point without eventually seeing some reference to Moneyball. Which is, of course, the approach adopted by Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Under it, Beane used sabermetrics-style data analysis to identify undervalued baseball players. And to build an overperforming MLB team on a smaller budget. With a 2002 season opening payroll of $40 million, for example, even as other teams, such as the New York Yankees, had payrolls of as much as $126 million in the same season.

Situations like these aren’t just limited to professional sports, however.

Indeed, fostering business creativity can be in the hands of managers as they think about, design and establish work environments. Furthermore, creativity often requires that managers radically change the ways in which they build and interact with work groups. That’s according to Teresa M. Amabile, who published an article called “How to Kill Creativity” in the September-October 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita at Harvard Business School. More recently, she’s also the author of “Retiring: Creating a Life that Works for You.” A 2024 book that explores how the process of retiring involves a reconstruction of both the person and their life structure.

In many ways, this type of transformation can call for conscious culture change on the parts of business managers, Amabile says in the 1998 article, based on findings from 22 years of research. But it can be done, and the rewards can be great.

Meanwhile, the risks of not doing so may be even greater, Amabile says. When creativity is killed, an organization loses a potent competitive weapon: new ideas. It can also lose the energy and commitment of its people.

But even if organizations seem trapped in organizational systems that kill creativity, Amabile says, it is still possible to effect widespread change.

As an example, Amabile points to a transformation at Procter & Gamble that began in mid-1990s. Once a hotbed of creativity, P&G had in recent years seen the number of its product innovations decline significantly.

In response, P&G established Corporate New Ventures (CNV), a small cross-functional team that embodied many creativity-enhancing practices. Members of P&G’s new CNV team, for instance, were allowed to elect themselves. Which helped ensure intrinsic motivation on the part of participating professionals.

CNV team members were also given a clear, challenging strategic goal: to invent radical new products that would build the company’s future. On the other hand, however, the team was additionally given enormous latitude around how, when and where they approached their work.

Undeniably, the changed environment inhabited by P&G’s CNV team resulted in more creative output. Three years after its inception, the team had handed off 11 projects to the business sectors for execution.

And as of early 1998, those projects were beginning to flow out of the pipeline. The first product, designed to provide portable heat for several hours’ relief of minor pain, was already in test marketing. And six other products were slated to go to market within a year. Given the team’s success, P&G began to expand both the size and scope of the CNV venture.

In a marketing or advertising context, it seems reasonable that organizations could adopt similar strategies to those identified by Amabile in the P&G case. Including through the formation of small, cross-functional creative teams focused on generating innovative ideas. As well as by empowering team members by giving them the autonomy and resources they need to succeed.

Which might in turn include an environment where they feel comfortable taking risks, brainstorming freely and challenging conventional thinking. Both in terms of physical space design, and virtual communication channels.

Marketing and advertising teams could also bring more focus to radical innovation by encouraging their members to think outside the box. And develop truly groundbreaking campaigns.

At the same time, teams in marketing and advertising might also beware the risks of stifling or “killing” creativity. Including missed opportunities such as failures to capitalize on emerging trends or technologies. Or the production of ineffective “copycat” marketing campaigns that lack innovation, and subsequently often fail to capture attention or generate results. Or even a loss of talent as creative individuals leave for more stimulating environments.

All of which could make tough to stay above .500, much less win the whole thing.