Different Viewpoints of Creativity and Innovation in East and West Asian Cultures

Running head: BUSINESS CREATIVE AND MARKETING
Business Creative and Marketing
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1BUSINESS CREATIVE AND MARKETING
There are increasing scholarly interest and debates on the viewpoints of creativity and
innovation. Innovation and creativity are considered to be fundamental for all the academic
disciplines as well as educational activities. The process of creativity is referred to one of the
most critical components for making sense of the learning experiences. On the other hand,
innovation can be thought as new ideas or new ways of looking towards some specific things,
products or methods, which have value. As per Perry-Smith and Mannucci (2017), creativity
as an active process that is very necessarily to be involved in the process of innovation.
However, this paper is going to elaborate on presenting a brief discussion on the different
viewpoints of creativity and innovation of different national cultures. With the same, by
shedding light on two countries, this paper shall explain how these different viewpoints can
affect business relationships between these two countries. The chosen countries or national
cultures for this purpose are East Asian cultures and West Asian cultures. It would further
compare these two cultures on the basis of three national comparison themes- a) educational
approaches to creativity, b) measuring individual creativity and c) differing attitudes to
creative individuals.
Educational approaches to creativity of the East Asian cultures and West Asian
cultures- The East Asian nations like China, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan etc. are
widely known for the high value that they place on the quality education. It is the foundation
for all the cultural values and it highly emphasize the education sectors, which has resulted in
economic growth of these countries. The difference in between the education system of the
Asian nations and the United States are really striking. However, every approach has
different benefits from which the other countries could learn. The East Asian countries often
seem to sacrifice the creativity because of the amount of repetition and memory work which
is expected. Often the Korean students are motivated by the social tradition and therefore, the
motivation is not intrinsic here. Instead, it is extrinsic. It is very critical as of the fact that the

2BUSINESS CREATIVE AND MARKETING
intrinsic motivation is conducive to the creativity. On the other hand, the extrinsic motivation
is detrimental in nature. In the Western parts of Asia like Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Turkey, UAE,
Saudi Arabia etc., it is something that embodies success as well as the contemporary trends of
excitement and novelty (Amabile and Pratt 2016). When linked with the individuals, cities,
regions or enterprises, creativity is something that develops an immediate empathy and at the
same time, conveys a significant image of dynamism. The cultural productions, as one of the
significant tools for communication have charged with emotion and subjectivity have taken
part in the expression of social life ever since the origin of mankind. However, it is also to
note that there is lack of enthusiasm regarding education in the Western nations but the level
of creativity among this people is widely admired. Furthermore, as per Cheung (2017), it is
very harder for the East Asian countries than the Westerners to feel, think and act in creative
way. This is due to the fact that the Asian society is very tightly structured and organised and
is collectivistic and hierarchical in nature.
Measuring individual creativity of the people from East Asian cultures and West
Asian cultures- In East Asian countries the economic growth and innovation are inter-related
but the strength of this link is dependent on the type of innovation. Apart from the cultural
norms and values, the cultural knowledge could easily serve as a significant source of the
intellectual inspirations for evoking the creativity. For instance, the relation of the economic
growth along with the knowledge outputs like the trade marks, patents etc. is comparatively
stronger than the creative outputs, comprising of the outputs from creative industries.
Moreover, the members from the East Asian cultures have very higher tendency of
harmonizing the conflicts as compared to the Western cultures (Steffens et al. 2016). With the
same, they also compromise the contradictions by finding out a middle ground. Hence, the
East Asian participants were very less likely as compared to the Western participants for
reaping the creative advantages from their experience of contradictions and paradoxes (Leung