Creativity and Innovation: An Essential Competency for the Nurse Leader

Innovation keeps an organization competitive and adaptive to change. Nurse leaders are looking for new ways to innovate and transform, being challenged to influence quality, design new care delivery models, and create workplaces that empower nurses to advance new ideas that lead to innovation. Innovation involves risk as well as new ways of thinking. The workforce must feel confident that a creative approach to problem-solving is valued and supported. The nurse leader must role model use of creative approaches to problem-solving and promote a spirit of innovation among today's workforce. The nurse leader can learn to be more creative and can use education to empower staff to use creative thinking techniques to solve problems in practice. The transformational nurse leader can use any one or more of the tools and techniques offered in this article to inspire and educate the workforce on creative approaches to problem-solving and ultimately to generate innovative solutions to real practice problems.