Enhancing Creativity & Innovation Through Playful Activities

As creativity requires mostly motivation, creativity skills, expertise, safe and risk free environment, openness and cross fertilization of ideas, a powerful method is to encourage play. The aim of this paper is to study the play element, its characteristics and benefit and to analyse how play can foster creative thinking. We demonstrate that playfulness is a powerful tool to enhance creativity, innovation and business performance. Play benefits are more than convincing, but as a new approach, it faces change management obstacle. Play requires frequency, repetition and to be involved in a whole innovation process. The management commitment has to move from play as a team building tool to play as a strategic method for innovation.