Global prestige beauty leaders The Estée Lauder Companies prides itself on having a worldwide reputation for quality and excellence, and has always been held up as a leader for best practice in collaboration.

Ideas fuel innovation. No ideas? No innovation! But what are ideas exactly? In this interview we ask Gerard Puccio PhD, author of “Creative Leadership” and the “FourSight® Thinking Profile” and chair of the oldest Master of Science program in Creative Studies, to illuminate what ideas are and where they come from.

A few years ago, I backpacked through Southeast Asia with my best friend, Lauren. We started in Kuala Lumpur, and by time we parted ways in Ho Chi Minh City, we were in the throws of violent food poisoning and barely on speaking terms. I was exasperated that Lauren had no interest in decision making, and Lauren was stressed by my tendency to get an idea and spontaneously alter our plans. Our frustrations climaxed with a fuming argument on a public train over 35 Thai baht (roughly one U.S. dollar). Thankfully, we both see the humor in this now.

#1. Creativity fuels innovation. Today, it’s hard to find an organization that doesn’t have “innovation” in its mission statement. Professor Felix Janszen stated, “After the age of efficiency in the 1950s and 1960s, quality in the 1970s and 1980s, and flexibility in the 1980s and 1990s, we now live in the age of innovation.” And for good reason: “Researchers tested whether innovation translated into bottom-line value for organizations. They compared more than 300 firms in their study and found that the most innovative firms enjoyed more than 30% greater market share, compared to the least innovative companies.” The most innovative firms were the most active in applying creativity to develop new knowledge. The researchers concluded that, “creativity in problem solving is the main driver of new knowledge creation and innovation.”

A recent study on health and wellbeing reported a surprising discovery: People with the longest commutes have the lowest life satisfaction.

A decade into the 21st century,educational leaders at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada saw the writing on the wall. Technology was eating up routine jobs. The traditional curriculum couldn’t guarantee work. They knew that to make students employable, they would need to teach creative thinking and creative problem solving skills. So they embraced a radical, new academic strategic plan to put creativity at the heart of the institution’s mission, marketing and curriculum. The goal was to create what Sheridan calls “the Creative Campus”—a place where “creativity is what makes us different.”

Q&A with Russ Schoen

How can you measure the impact of teaching creative thinking? It’s a challenge. Plenty of research shows the positive impact it has on individuals, but little research exists on the impact creativity training has on organizations, particularly on their top line growth. That changed in 2015, when a FourSight-based creative problem solving training program was identified as the key catalyst in supporting organizational growth.

According to the Innovation Network, 88 percent of all organizations have the word “innovation” or “creativity” in their mission statements. But less than 5 percent of those same organizations have programs in place to teach innovation or creativity and make it part of the culture.

In training sessions, half a world apart, two innovation experts told the same story. Art Beckman and Silvi Steigerwald are two of the key architects of the innovation program in HP Software. Part of their job is training HP Software managers, more than a thousand worldwide, to support a culture of innovation. Recently they went on the road—Art to Massachusetts and Silvi to Shanghai—to train more HP managers in innovation HP style. Their innovation curriculum starts with FourSight: Your Thinking Profile, and they always tell the same story.