Amelia Gandara

Creativity: A Critical Element in Corporate Innovation

Posted by Amelia Gandara, Sep 24, 2015 0 comments


Amelia Gandara

My love for dance started at home. My mother danced ballet through high school, and I’m convinced she named me after a character from The Turning Pointe. By the time I was 5 years old, I was training with her same instructor at Yuma Ballet Academy where I remained until I graduate high school and joined my first company.

My path to science has a similar story. I’ve had an affinity for science ever since my aunt explained what it’s like to be an aerospace engineer. She sent me “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawkings when I was just 10 years old and would share with me her dreams of working for NASA.

Looking back, it was my early exposure to both art and science that allowed me to grow up believing I could excel in any area. After dancing ballet professionally for a couple of years, I decided to enter university to become a chemical engineer. Perseverance and the drive for excellence, skills forged in dance training, made four years of a rigorous course load bearable.

The Nature of Creatives

Upon graduation, I began working at FirstBuild, a subsidiary of GE Appliances that brings together a community of engineers, designers, makers and cooking enthusiasts to co-create the next generation of home appliances via an online platform and physical microfactory. The core team at FirstBuild is made almost entirely of designers and mechanical, electrical, and software engineers who act as community managers on the web platform and assist with the R&D process, and who realize the value in exterior creativity. What’s most interesting are the additional passions of the team. For example, the product manager is a drummer, an electrical engineer builds speakers and synthesizers, and the community manager is an avid rock climber. Each overcome challenges—through art and skill—that they are able to bring back into the workplace. Dance prepared me for the ebb and flow of teamwork. There are times when I’d get a solo, like a presentation to the public in the workplace, and times when I had to blend seamlessly into the corp de ballet, like when preparing for a product launch.

Firstbuld recently partnered with IDEAS Louisville on an artist-in-residence program and ArtHack in an effort to foster creativity among staff and local artists. During the ArtHack, home appliances were deconstructed and repurposed as installation art pieces. The culture of FirstBuild has become one that embraces artists, so far that artists are hired alongside student engineers for tasks in the microfactory from light manufacturing to assisting in management of the makerspace. FirstBuild was proud to be selected as a BCA 10: Best Businesses Partnering with the Arts in America honoree this year.

What it Takes to Be Innovative

For many roles today, the degree isn’t enough. Employers are increasingly looking to hire well-rounded employees, as evidenced in the Ready to Innovate research report. This may be most apparent in technical disciplines like engineering; with a demand for more customized products and services, the idea that brilliant engineers can be locked away in a research lab to solve problems is no longer held by the most innovative companies. The value in creating is now shared amongst a team along the product: lifecycle from design to manufacturing to - most recently, the consumer.

The most creative people are cross disciplinary, and can draw from many seemingly disparate experiences, often across their entire life, not just professional career. No training course can spur creativity. An individual is creative by the nature of their versatility and various passions… and thrives in a work environment that shows appreciation for diversity of thought. 

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