Page - 168 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

2.4 Critical Perspective onDigital Creativity Digital creativitycanbringaplethoraofpositiveoutcomes regardingbusiness ideas and solutions for current problems.However, there are several challenges in regard to thecreativeprocessof companies.Themain issue is the fact that the transition to amore creative economy carries significant costs for an existing business (Lehrer et al. 2018). Businesses have to keep up with the newest innovations to keep competingwith new start-ups which usually appear with creative solutions for an existing problem. Creative people are a good asset to the company; however, people are hired to work. If they do not deliverwhat they are hired for but keep coming upwith new ideas, companies will not run smoothly andworkwill not be done. In addition to this, one cannot always apply new ideas. Sometimes, it seemsbest tofirst focus on one new idea and then after it has been implemented or refused, to look for additional innovations (Lehrer et al. 2018). Another point is that not all ideas or innovations are useful (Soulsby 2019). Therefore, it is important to have a good look at which innovations need to be implementedandwhicharenotworth the timeandmoney.Agoodworking system to decidewhich innovations are relevant can save a lot ofmoney and time for the company. If companies focus on an innovation that is not relevant and do not add any value to the company, it can lose the competition with other companies who choose another innovation (Sherman 2019). Sometimes it is better to be cautious with the company’s decisions and not taking high risks. When there is economic uncertainty, it might be better to not implement creative ideas with the risk that it will fail and increase costs. In such situations, itmight be better to be cautious and not experimentwith creativity (too much). A more in-depth risk of implementing creative and innovative ideas is that a certain ideaorproject takes too long to implement.This is averycostlyoccurrence, and businesses can run out of money which results in insolvency risk for the business. This can cause problemswith the future existence of the company. The new innovative product can face the fact that it is more difficult to produce and therefore not produced on a large scale which results in higher production costs (Soulsby 2019). The return on investment is not guaranteedwhich then can anger investors and stakeholders (Sherman 2019). Another downside of innovative products is that quality canbe received as poor and thendamages the reputation of the whole company. This has consequences not only for that product but also for the company. The company can be facing lower sales levels which then would affect the financial position of the company. There aremultiple examples of innovation that went wrong. But there are two types of innovations thatwentwrong.One is a newproduct or service thatwas not receivedwell by themarket. The second is the lack of innovation in which com- panies stayed behind their competitors which resulted in a loss of market share. When this happened, it is usually too late to catch up. Digital Creativity: Upgrading Creativity in Digital Business 173