What It Takes To Be a Creative Impact Organization

When solving the world’s biggest problems, it pays to be creative

After publishing the Directory of Purpose-Driven Creative Organizations (DoPCO), a reader asked me what criteria I used to determine the organizations that made the cut. The answer? An entirely soft set of criteria that needed organization and clarity.

So I typed up the criteria below, and also included the thought process I used to develop it. And if the criteria below hold water, I believe they could be leveraged further to help measure the size of the creative impact economy or for other projects to be determined in the future.

The Creative Criteria

John Howkins’ — an expert in the field of creative economics — has written several books on the subject of creativity/innovation and how people create and capture value from their ideas. As a result, I’ve always leaned heavily on him when identifying creative organizations, measuring their economic impact, and defining the boundaries of the industry.

As he states, identifying the size of, and the participants in the creative economy is difficult.

The first and most obvious approach is to simply measure the number of specific individuals operating in creative roles in any given industry to learn more about the economic and cultural impact they create. The issues with this approach are equally as obvious however: defining which jobs are creative and which are not is subjective. Additionally, measuring the creative economy with the metric of individual roles means having to count each specific job, and therefore the entire process is like counting a moving target — as compared to taking a single snapshot of a single point in time. Finally, even with an agreed-upon definition of creativity, and resources in place to count all of the individual creative jobs, one is bound to miss creative roles that exist in non-creative industries.

The other approach is to simply shift the focus from the nature of each role to the nature of the work. One of the more reputable examples of this is the method developed by Britain’s BOP Consulting (also referenced in Howkins’ book), in which they proposed a series of overlapping circles “where core artistic industries are in the centre while at distance from the centre to periphery, circles emphases degree to which cultural content decreases relatively to its commercial value.”

To paraphrase, the basic model has four concentric circles, with the most artistic/creative industries in the center. The further out from the center of the circle, the greater the amount of commercial value that is created by that industry (typically). Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a graphical representation of the this model and so I’ve mocked one up for easy viewing here:

I should also note that in regards to the model portrayed above, Howkins states in his book Creative Ecologies, Where Thinking is a Proper Job, Britain had originally defined “Creative Industries” as all activities that involved intellectual property, including patents — and as such the category included science and innovation. However pressure from other government departments in Britain persuaded the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport to focus on industries that primarily dealt with copyrights, instead of the entirety of intellectual property.

As a result of that compromise, the government settled on industries that dealt with copyrights instead of the whole of intellectual property. Thus, the industries typically identified as being ‘creative’ were as follows:

1. Advertising
2. Architecture
3. Art and Antiques
4. Crafts
5. Design
6. Designer Fashion
7. Film and Video
8. Interactive Leisure Sofware
9. Music
10. Performing Arts
11. Publishing
12. Software and Computer Services
13. TV and Radio

This is certainly not a comprehensive list, and as stated at the beginning of this section, what is considered ‘creative’ is certainly subjective. However, for the time being, it works and is a fairly widely accepted model. It is a vastly oversimplified method, but after reading through some of the issues with other approaches I hope that it’s easy to understand how I decided to use it as the de facto criteria for inclusion in the directory.

The Impact Criteria

Having — at least for the moment —defined how we determine which organizations may or may not be viewed as creative, we must now turn to the equally complex matter of determining organizations that are engaged in “social impact.”

For all of the literature on the subject, there is surprisingly little that is agreed-upon in terms of the definition of the term. B Corp has criteria and an infrastructure in place for companies to be considered for their certification, but no clear definition. The Aspen Institute defines their understanding of the subject in terms of business management. McKinsey & Company define what a social impact assessment is, but again, not how to define social impact itself.

Therefore I prefer to keep the above ‘definitions’ in mind, while also utilizing the framework from Conscious Capitalism, the book by John Mackey (Founder of Whole Foods) and Rajendra Sisodia. Granted the framework they’ve laid out in their book is meant solely for market-driven organizations (hence “Capitalism” in the title), but I believe the general principle applies to all organizations working to make an impact.

In short, they frame conscious capitalism as having four tenets:

1. Higher Purpose: For example, Medtronics purpose is not to sell more pacemakers, but to restore people to their full life and health — the pacemaker is just a vehicle to doing so)
2. Stakeholder Integration: Not thinking of managing for stakeholders as a zero-sum game between customers, investors, team members, etc., but instead identifying ways that make all stakeholders better off as a result of your organization’s efforts.
3. Conscious Leadership: Leaders who are primarily “motivated by service to the purpose of the business and its stakeholders and not by the pursuit of power or personal enrichment.”
4. Conscious Culture and Management: organizational cultures that include seven characteristics: Trust, Accountability, Caring, Transparency, Integrity, Loyalty, Agalitarianism.

It seems to be the best short summary of what conscious capitalism — or in other words ‘social impact through the lens of the market-based economy’ — consists of in terms of investments that organizations make. Translating the above to be relevant purely to social impact, and therefore applicable to NGOs as well, I would interpret it as: Social impact is the effect an individual or organization has when improving the state of the world, primarily executed by: having a purpose beyond profit, integrating all stakeholders who interact with the organization, and having leadership that is motivated a purpose beyond their own benefit.

The Joint Criteria

Combining these two very subjective measurements means that yes, it’s difficult to set concrete criteria for an organization to be considered a “creative impact” company. And although it’s tempting to simply say “you know it when you see it” that isn’t a definition that can be applied in a replicable, objective manner. It’s not functional for passing the information along or building a body of work that people can point to and say “Yes, all of those organizations meet x, y, and z, criteria.”

So it is a tough thing to do — to determine who is truly a creative impact organization. And this criteria that I’ve set forth surely isn’t the ultimate, end-all be-all. However it’s a step in the right direction and will hopefully get us a little closer to the answer. And more importantly, it will hopefully help us determine how we can use creativity in the future to solve the large problems that are facing us right now.