Creativity is needed, in small and big ways, because starting from an idea, from “nothing” and even with little to “no money”, it takes imagination in every detail to start working towards your goals. In addition, changes in practice require a lot of imagination to face up to the various unexpected challenges that may arise. There is a particular value in someone who can add value to their project, someone who can make an attention-grabbing proposal, someone who can think in alternative ways to the usual, and who can be enthusiastic about it and infect others with this drive.

Creativity in the world of startups is best described as “Think outside the box”, so that we don’t just think in terms of design. This business English slang term is not used here primarily in its original meaning, thinking outside the box means coming up with new ideas, using new approaches, seeing things differently from others.

Training exercise: Participants work in groups of five or close to five. The task is to come up with marketing ideas for the “Giovanni’s” spaghetti factory. The factory offers a 1.5 km long but only 30 cm wide piece of land for the campaign. The task of the participants is to use this land in as many ways as possible to present and promote the spaghetti factory, using as many creative solutions as possible. The teams will write down the ideas they have collected on a flip chart, draw them and present them to the group at the end.

Tools for the exercise: Flip-Chart, Post-it – 4 colors, Blue Tech, Markers

If planning and organization emerge as a competence, do not confuse busyness with productivity and efficiency. Everyone has had experiences of spending days intensively working, writing or going from meeting to meeting, but at the end of the day feeling that they had not achieved any real results. It’s easy to fall into this trap and that’s why it’s so important to work on your personal productivity, to be able to optimize the use of your time, energy and activities.   

There are a number of soft skills that support planning and organization, but it is worth analyzing strategic, analytical, and conceptual thinking.

The ability to think strategically or to orientate takes on significance when we talk about the need for entrepreneurs and organizations to maintain a dynamic environment by developing and following continuous strategic change. It comes to the fore when their survival depends on their ability to innovate their models, to rethink flexible responses to market forces. As this is primarily a people-dependent process, entrepreneurs are the drivers of

of the change process, they are the ones who make strategic decisions based on their beliefs, their perceptions of the economic and social environment, their business portfolio and the state of the organization.

Analytical thinking is the ability to understand and solve situations, to solve problems by breaking down their components in a logical and systematic way. It is this technique, this type of thinking, that makes it possible to improve the quality of analysis in any aspect of any professional activity, providing those who use it with an advantage that is visible in the effectiveness of the results achieved. They are also a quick and efficient way to improve our agenda and time management.

Conceptual thinking is the application of creative, conceptual or inductive reasoning to existing concepts or to define new concepts. Conceptual thinking is understanding a situation or problem by putting the pieces together to determine to establish completeness.