Creativity finds a way: The future of creativity
The new generation of creatives increasingly consists of digital natives who expect the freedom to work flexibly while delivering innovative and engaging customer experiences. Combined with the rise of remote working and dispersed teams, flexible working has posed new challenges and opportunities for creative collaboration.
New digital workflows and adoption of cloud-based creative technologies are critical in ensuring business - and operational - continuity, as well as offering creative teams greater flexibility and better ways to collaborate from anywhere in the world.
As part of our new series, Creativity Finds A Way, we caught up with Luke Wheatley, co-founder of In Three Production, to discuss the future of creative collaboration and to unpack what creative leaders need to know to succeed in our new digital-first world.
During this interview, Wheatley recounts how the adoption of new technologies to enable creative collaboration during the pandemic allowed him to find new ways of working.
Questioning the status quo
In-person collaboration has always been an assumption during the creative process, but for Wheatley, this idea is outdated. Questioning the traditional ways of work, he was able to lean into technology and find new avenues to produce video and collaborate with other creatives around the world - without leaving his home.
In his opinion, companies and creatives locked in smaller communities based around physical proximity have - thanks partly to the challenges of the pandemic and the emergence of new technologies - developed the openness necessary to explore new methods to collaborate. From his studio in Australia, he has been able to direct and participate with teams in the US, South Africa and Spain throughout this period, for example.
“You can have an idea creatively, but when you collaborate with someone who has a different skill set, different frame of mind and different perspective on your creative. It can only make your creative better.”
Luke Wheatley, co-founder, In Three Production
The role of creativity in driving companies
Another change brought about by technology and collaboration, Wheatley acknowledges, has been the inclusion of creatives in the strategic decisions of the company. With new perspectives and ways of thinking, creatives have been brought into the executive fold to guide decision making around how to communicate with customers in novel ways.
Moreover, some companies may be reluctant to embrace new technologies and opt for more traditional ways of working. With an innate openness to new ideas, creatives within companies are not restrained by what has worked before and allow for easier adoption of new ways of work, moving businesses forward into the future.
Value of creativity
Wheatley believes companies that will be successful in the long term view creativity as a strategic asset. With customers present across multiple touchpoints, customer experiences are vastly different than they once were, and the strategic decisions around them have equally grown. Thus, creativity is now at the forefront of how companies talk to their customers.
Technology allows us to be more collaborative, to form new relationships and establish new ways of working. Ultimately technology is a facilitator for our creativity, and business leaders must embrace it to thrive in the digital-first world.