Written by M Suyanto
Entrepreneurs are people who respond to any changes in the environment in creative and innovative ways. Environmental changes do not cause problems, including crises, provided that they are solved in such ways. Thus, beyond the emergence of difficulties or the threat, there is also a promising opportunity. Creativity is the ability to promising new ideas, and innovation is the application of new thoughts.
As a matter of fact, we are all creative beings, and if creativity has never been practiced regularly, it can be paralyzed as the muscles of someone who have never done exercise. According to the measurement of the creativity done through the tests given to different age groups, the above statement proves to be true. In terms of creativity, George Land proposed in his research report entitled “Break-Point and Beyond” that five-year-old children got a score of 98%; ten-year-old children received a score of 32%; fiveteen-year-old children gained a score of 10%; and forty-two-year-old adults obtained only a score of 2%. According to the result of the research, the children were inclined to be more creative than adults. In short, children make creatively thinking skills their routine activities. They always make an observation and ask a question that they love most, that is to say, “Why?”. Sometimes children do not believe the remark of an adult until they are able to prove its truth themselves and take conclusions of their own. When my daughter was three years old, she asked her mother, “Mom, what is Heaven like?” Her mother replied, “In heaven, if you ask for meals, they will soon come themselves, and when you ask for drinks, they will immediately come alone.” My daughter spontaneously responded, “So, heaven is like a restaurant, isn’t it?.” Hearing the answer, my wife smiled spontaneously. Then, my son once asked me a funny question. When I came home from work, he suddenly asked me, “Dad, if you have five tennis balls in your hands, and one of them falls, what will happen?”. “I still have four balls in my hand,” I replied. “You are wrong. The correct answer is that the ball that falls changes into a rabbit,” he said. “Why does the ball become a rabbit?” I asked in surprise. “Yes, because it was magic,” he answered innocently. Why he replied so was because he once saw such a magic on TV. Furthermore, there was another five-year-old child who suggested a very good idea. One day the child walked at night. Then, because it was dark, he tripped over a stone, and he spontaneously he said, “The shoes should have had lights on them.” This idea has inspired some shoe makers who have produced shoes with lights on them, and of course what the child has proposed constitutes remarkable creativity. However, in process of growing up kids tend to follow the rules of adults and receive information without any dispute. With the rules and limits of adults, the creativity of the children really becomes limited. However, keeping asking, drawing conclusions, and seeing things from a new point of view as children do, we will remain creative and innovative.