Businesses expand not by following the formula, but by expanding it through creative, out-of-the-box approaches. “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” is the mantra of many – and many who fail. “If it isn’t broke, improve it before it breaks” is the mantra of the successful. For business is never static.

The struggle for many businesses lies in how to foster that creativity. How do you get ideas on the table, motivation from your workers who perhaps feel locked in as a gear in the machine and nothing more?

For a lesson in creativity, look no farther than animation giants at Pixar. Don’t look at the films, the creations. What’s more important, and more applicable to businesses as a whole, is how they brought out that creativity in the first place.

It’s never ONE idea

Everything that happens at Pixar stems from the belief that there is no single idea. A character or a plot doesn’t exist by itself. Stretching beyond the film world, a single idea means little to a successful business. Pick virtually any of your possessions, from your technical gadgets to a pocketbook and everything in-between. It will be incredibly rare to find an object that’s a single idea in and of itself.

Take a look at your mobile phone. How many ideas can you identify that make your phone what it is? Flip or slide? Touch screen or no? Look at your applications, your tools, and settings. Your iPod? Same thing. Originally conceived as a sleek-looking MP3 player, it was the scrolling system, menu layout, and iTunes components – all different parts, different concepts – that brought the total package together.

Sharing is essential

The necessary offshoot is that those ideas are meant to be shared. Pixar president and co-founder Ed Catmull attributes that idea to Star Wars creator George Lucas, whom Catmull worked for at Lucasfilm with the responsibility to bring computer graphics and digital technology into films. “George didn’t try to lock up the technology for himself, and allowed us to continue to publish and maintain strong academic contacts,” Catmull wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “This made it possible to attract some of the best people in the industry.”

Consider open source programming, as mentioned in our robotics feature. In the technology industry, this work is common. A company creates a core technology, such as Unix, and releases it for other companies to build from. Such sharing can bring new talent in to your business, as Catmull noted from his own experience, inspire new ideas by opening up exchanges among different parties with their hands on the same core information, or establish your business as the leader at the given movement. After all, if you’ve created the core idea being shared, all others are followers. You’re still the innovator, only now you have a larger base to expand your initiative.

Of course, while keeping the channels open outside your own organisation, of greater importance is eliminating internal barriers. In order to foster creativity, Pixar stresses that anyone should be able to approach anyone else in order to solve a problem. This requires managers to loosen the reins on process a little bit and accept that they will not always be the first to know about everything, and will occasionally be surprised.

Innovation education

Tying all of these ideas together is the overlying theme that in any business, everyone involved is always learning. It’s never all figured out. At Pixar, this is epitomised by Pixar University, which trains employees in multiple skills as they advance through the company. Optional courses – more than 110 of them, in fact, are available to all employees. Yes, everyone, from the animators to the security guards, can take a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting, and creative writing. The result is a staff in which workers from different disciplines not only learn new skills, but can interact and appreciate what others involved in the process do.

The concept provides more people with the knowledge to take an idea and improve upon it, which Pixar University terms ‘plus-ing’.

“Take a piece of work and don't judge it,” says Pixar University dean Randy Nelson. “Say, ‘here’s where I'm starting, what can I do with this?’”

If it sounds as though there’s an inherent risk in that approach, you’re right. After all, sometimes you end up trying to wring blood from a stone. But that’s OK. In fact, Pixar believes it’s essential. “The core skill of an innovator is error recovery, not failure avoidance,” says Nelson.

Power of positive thinking

When Apple’s Steve Jobs brought Pixar director and animator Brad Bird onboard with Pixar in 2000, he worried that the company’s recent success would make it hard to stay innovative. “The only thing we’re afraid of is complacency – feeling like we have it all figured out,” Bird quotes Jobs as saying at the time. “We want you to come shake things up.”

With that, Bird changed the process. “I got everybody in a room and told them, ‘As individual animators, we all have different strengths, but we are collectively the greatest animator on earth. So I want you guys to speak up and drop your drawers. We’re going to look at your scenes in front of everybody. Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together.’”

Ideas are creative cash, and this is true particularly for a startup business of any kind. And without positive workers – people energised about what they’re doing – that creative cash is inaccessible.

“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget – but never shows up in a budget – is morale,” Bird says. “If you have low morale, for every US$1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every US$1 you spend, you get about US$3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”