- Canva report: Creativity needs the right tools to flourish
Canva report: Creativity needs the right tools to flourish
We partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services to understand how challenging it can be to foster creativity at work.
In today’s crowded market, businesses need to get creative to stand out. Creative ideas have the power to inspire teams, engage customers, and fuel product innovation – but not every workplace is a creative one, and not every manager encourages their team to think creatively.
We partnered with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services(opens in a new tab or window) to understand how challenging it can be to foster creativity at work. Of the more than 500 global business leaders we talked to, 96% believe creative ideas are essential to an organisation’s long-term success, and 94% see creativity as a key driver of strategic growth. Despite the near-unanimous agreement that creativity is important for businesses, few are actually successful at turning creative ideas into impact.
We took a look at three categories of organisations – leaders, followers, and laggards – based on their success in identifying creative solutions to business problems, regardless of whether they acted on the ideas.
Here’s what we learned.
Workplaces are falling short when it comes to nurturing creativity
Nine out of ten (91%) people agreed that creative thinking is a crucial attribute for employees – but just because creativity is valued, doesn’t always mean it’s rewarded. In fact, more than half of laggards (58%) say their organisational culture doesn’t reward creative pursuits. Meanwhile, 41% of leaders encourage employees to take creative risks and think outside the box.
Nearly everyone surveyed (94%) agreed that having a creative leader increases the creativity of their team, but nearly three-quarters of laggards (72%) say the leadership at their organisation isn’t engaged enough in creative thinking to support creativity among the broader team.
As organisations look to foster creativity at the leadership level and beyond, they’re increasingly turning to Canva to empower teams to easily collaborate on high-impact, engaging visual content. Today, nearly 95% of the Fortune 500 uses Canva as their all-in-one visual communication platform.
Creativity needs the right tools to flourish
Ninety-four percent of respondents see a positive link between an organisation’s investment in creative technology and how successful the business will be in the future. The majority (87%) expect their organisation’s overall financial investment in creativity-building tools and technologies to increase or stay the same in the next year.
Collaboration can enhance the creative process by tapping into new ideas, perspectives, and approaches. Leaders are significantly more likely than laggards to facilitate cross-functional collaboration (53% vs 14%) and encourage different ways of thinking (52% vs 15%). Digital collaboration tools like Canva Whiteboards(opens in a new tab or window) can be an easy way to inject creative thinking into everyday meetings, with plenty of space(opens in a new tab or window) for building out mood boards, organising bold ideas on sticky notes, or sharing things like research or checklists in an engaging way.
Generative AI is still top of mind
Forty-two percent of leaders think generative AI can enhance creativity in their organisation to a great extent. For example, according to leaders, generative AI may fuel creativity by:
- automating repetitive tasks, freeing employees up to focus on more creative endeavors (62%)
- accelerating idea generation (60%), and
- creating content with minimal human intervention (49%)
With Canva’s Magic Studio(opens in a new tab or window), teams can kickstart the creative process with AI tools designed for each step in the creative process. Magic Write(opens in a new tab or window) can help you with a first draft, fast, while Magic Grab and Magic Eraser make photo editing(opens in a new tab or window) a breeze.
Generative AI(opens in a new tab or window) is here to stay, and organisations are getting more comfortable with the idea that safe AI tools can accelerate creative thinking(opens in a new tab or window) rather than hinder it. In fact, Expedia(opens in a new tab or window)’s social media teams use Canva’s Magic Expand and Magic Switch tools to handle resizing and expanding images themselves rather than outsourcing to multiple designers. This saves the team a ton of time, enabling them to focus on more intensive creative work.
At Canva, we’re focused on empowering every organisation to design. From our Visual Suite(opens in a new tab or window) to Magic Studio(opens in a new tab or window), the breadth and depth of our platform enable teams across organisations to communicate visually, think creatively, and collaborate in real time. Creative thinking drives so much of our own work, so we’ve seen first-hand the impact investing in creativity can have on our business.
To read more insights, check out the full report: Creativity as a Catalyst for Business Growth(opens in a new tab or window).
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