Six Secrets to Develop a Marketing Team of Innovators That Will Increase Patient Volume and Contribution Margin

80% of CEO’s say the market is so complex that it demands new ways of thinking. This is especially true in health care delivery… but are you creating an environment for innovative thinking?

If you want innovative new marketing ideas and real, effective responses to health reform, you must develop a crew of creative thinkers.

How do you do that?

Here are six suggestions from a post on Harvard Business Review. The whole post may be worth reading, but here is a short summary

1. Meet People’s Needs. Recognize that questioning orthodoxy and convention ‚Äî the key to creativity ‚Äî begins with questioning the way people are expected to work. Begin by asking employees, one at a time, what they need to perform at their best. Next, define what success looks like and hold people accountable to specific metrics
2. Teach Creativity Systematically. It isn’t magical and it can be developed. There are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.
3. Nurture Passion. Look for small ways to give employees, at every level, the opportunity and encouragement to follow their interests and express their unique talents.
4. Make the Work Matter. Human beings are meaning-making animals. Money pays the bills but it’s a thin source of meaning. We feel better about ourselves when we we’re making a positive contribution to something beyond ourselves.
5. Provide the Time. Creative thinking requires relatively open-ended, uninterrupted time, free of pressure for immediate answers and instant solutions.
6. Value Renewal. Human beings are not meant to operate continuously the way computers do. We’re designed to expend energy for relatively short periods of time ‚Äî no more than 90 minutes ‚Äî and then recover.

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