Innovative Elevator Speech Assignment: MGT/411, Week 1

This assignment presents an elevator speech by a student, focusing on their entrepreneurial mindset, creative thinking, and innovative approaches to business. The speech highlights the importance of curiosity, adaptability, and admitting mistakes as key traits for success. The student discusses their consultancy firm aimed at promoting entrepreneurship among women, addressing challenges such as fundraising and educational background. The speech also explores the role of creativity and innovation in organizations, emphasizing the need for employee motivation, supportive leadership, and the avoidance of political hindrances. Furthermore, the student provides a competitive advantage analysis of Schott, illustrating the role of innovation and technology. The speech concludes by discussing how technology can be used to improve communication and transport, boosting economic growth.

Elevator speech
An entrepreneur should always be curious and a creative thinker. Therefore, on this note, I
always keep on asking myself questions concerning what can be done if I wasn’t doing what am
doing today. This keeps me awake and on toes thus always come with new ways of doing my
things in my business. For example, if a particular product or activity is giving me losses even
after trying several ways of making it better, I will always do away with it and bring something
new which is more profitable. Besides, admitting mistakes is my style of living. As a creative
thinker and an innovative entrepreneur, I am always ready to admit whenever I do things wrong.
Most entrepreneurs fail because they find it difficult to admit that they went wrong thus looking
for excuses. This is because they don't like losing an argument or been seen as incorrect. But for
my case, I learned to accept corrections and this has helped me learn a lot from others.
On the other hand, there are many businesses globally that are run by individuals but most of
them are men. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. & Organisation,
E. C.-D. (2008), reports that most women find it difficult to concentrate on entrepreneurship
activities. This is mainly because of the challenges such as fundraising, identification of
opportunities, family policies and educational background among others which are faced in the
entrepreneurship sectors. All these make the women have to have fear and low esteem of
becoming entrepreneurs despite there been many opportunities and market gaps. To merge the
gap between the female and male entrepreneurs, I have started a consultancy firm that aims at
promoting as well as encouraging entrepreneurship among women. This will be achieved by
creating training programs that will promote confidence and growth among the women. During
this training, I will demonstrate, and explain the real-life skills, entrepreneurial practical and
financial skills which one should posse as key skills when starting a business.

Shalley, C. E., Et.al. (2015), thinking depends on one's knowledge to make a judgment on how
useful or effective a new idea is. He points out that people should not only engage in cognitive
variation when creating new ideas but they should also consider eliminating the ineffective and
retain the useful ideas. I, therefore, feel empowered to be creative and innovative because my
skills have taken positively and embarked on by my audience as well as Shelly’s findings.
Moreover, Runco, M. A., & Pritzker, S. R. (2011), support my traits by providing that innovation
is linked to cognitive thinking thus people who think cognitively are very creative. In addition to
this, he argues that an innovative individual is characterized by openness to new ideas, tolerance,
and self-confidence. Moreover, he states that leadership and guidance support is very crucial in
individual innovation and creativity because the leader bridged the gap between the individual
and the team level. This also applies to my case because I have already started a consultancy firm
that will be bridging the gap between the non-innovative and entrepreneurial women and make
the members of the great entrepreneur's team.
My audience asked several questions on creativity and innovation. For instance, one person
asked how she can improve creativity and innovation in an organization and the response was; as
an organization, creativity can be promoted by increasing external communication, increasing
specialization and division of work and providing technical knowledge resources (Runco, M. A.,
& Pritzker, S. R, 2011). Another question was raised on how to cab the challenges facing the
female entrepreneurs and it was clearly stated that support social, psychological and
entrepreneurial skills constraints that face the women needed to be addressed where training,
gender intervention and promising women entrepreneur support was recommended. Concerning
the firm, a question was asked on whether it will only cater to the women issues alone. The

response was that the firm will cater for all gender but women will have the priority because they
are the most affected.
Creativity and innovation among employees
Most of the employees are experts in their work while others have creative thinking skills.
However, for these employees to be innovative, the organization should encourage them by
giving them motivation and support. The organizational leaders must put in place procedures and
policies that make creativity and innovation a priority among its employees rather than
employing creative employees. Some employees value extrinsic motivation which includes
threats, promotion, and financial incentives while others are motivated by the intrinsic factors
because to them monetary motivation makes them feel controlled. Some of the intrinsic
motivating factors include employee satisfaction, sense of accomplishment of an objective,
curiosity to see the result among others. The organization should ensure that these motivation
factors are administered to the employees based on their take I order ensure that their creativity
and innovation in nourished. Besides, leaders should not allow political factors to hinder
creativity. Politics and gossips are a great monster to creativity and innovation because they
cause conflicts in the organization. (Henry, J, 2006). In any organization, creativity is the first
crucial step that leaders should put into consideration when hiring new employees. This is
because the organization is operating in a competitive environment where creativity is the only
way of challenging employees and coming up with new ideas. Also, an innovative employee is
very competitive because if you are innovative you will automatically come up with creative
ways of doing things thus reducing the need for hiring the third party hence reducing the budget.
An additional advantage of promoting innovation and creativity rather than hiring is that

employees increase their trust beyond the status quo thus they end up sticking to that
organization (Dinham, J, 2020).
Competitive advantage concept
Schott is among the big companies in the United States of America. The company has grown
from the production of motorcycle leather jackets and outerwear to the production of other types
of clothes. This has been achieved through the description of its innovative goals towards;
adoption to external environmental changes, having flexible strategies which can accommodate
and meet the needs of all its clients; suppliers, distributors, lenders among others, ability to
respond the environment changed and making use of any emerging opportunity, being in a
position to cope with the existing competition by meeting the needs of their customers and lastly
the ability to prioritize the development of the new product, technologies, and markets. The
company’s innovation philosophy of “working as a family” has enabled the company to grow
from its humble origin to a celebrity’s staple. The innovative idea of being the first company to
have a zipped jacket enables the company to penetrate through the competitive market because it
was able to outdo its competitors. Also, the company has ensured that throughout the years, its
quality utility is maintained where the jackets last longer than other fashion brands. Schott has
been in the first to the advantage of new trends. This is because the company is still in the United
States thus been able to control the quality of their products. On the other hand, the US has been
experiencing a shortage of material thus forcing the company to import the required raw
materials. This was seen as an additional cost to the company hindering the production of some
styles and therefore decided to make some of its jackets overseas. The company applies its
quality standards in all its jackets that are not made from the Us to retain and build customer
confidence ( Hancock, J Et.al, 2013).

Coupling technology
Technology can be termed as a competitive and advantageous powerful drive. Innovative
approaches have been enabled by the evolution of technology which has advanced in the
communication and transport sectors thus boosting the economic growth of countries.
Technological innovation consists of two import hubs of which are the creation of geographical
hubs and empowerments of knowledge exchange through communication and transportation.
These hubs give rooms for fast spread and implementation of technology globally. Information
Technology is among the industries that have incorporated technology. Before most of the work
used to be done manually but as a result the electronic age, most of the things are done by
computers using digital technologies (Waldo, J Et.al, 2007).