According to this blog over at MIT, the answer is “yes”.
Researchers broke down society into creators and imitators. Their task was to see what optimum amount of creativity is needed to benefit society through the dissemination of innovations.
Turns out that if creators are doing their thing 50% of the time, and imitators imitating 100% of the time, approximately 30%-40% of the population should be creators, the rest imitators. As the quality of ideas goes up, less creators are needed.
While it’s an interesting study and worthy of some pondering, three shortcomings bother me.
1. The study assumes all creative ideas are meant for sharing.
In fact, most of our creativity isn’t ‘public’ but is meant for us personally-meant to make our own lives easier. Most ideas don’t get disseminated and hence don’t get built upon; nevertheless, these people are part of society and so indirectly improve society through their hidden innovations.
2. Each creative idea does not result in negative repercussions.
Most solutions that get adapted result in unwanted consequences of some sort. This results in additional idea generation, often by others who at some earlier time were only bystanders (imitators) but could very well have been creators in a different realm.
3. The study assumes there is a portion of the population that is only imitating.
I don’t think this is a valid assumption (see Point 1).
While, I realize that this fascinating attempt to model the impact of creativity on society is not meant to be 100% accurate, if we apply this model to corporate cultures, we realize that only a small percentage of people in a company could truly be called creators -most are imitators and (gasp!) are expected to be imitators.
Therefore, according to this model, those few creators in the company need to be amazingly brilliant and doing their creation the overwhelming majority of the time. But, given that the minutiae of day-to-day workings insidiously creep in on most people without their knowledge, those creators are probably not even working on creating as much as they should be (imitating?) and not contributing to the overall level of corporate fitness.
The result (at least according to this model) is that most corporate cultures never reach their optimum level of fitness.
This is something that, unfortunately, most people would not argue with.
