In a rapidly changing world and a fundamentally new business environment, it has become a business priority for business owners of all sizes to use more innovation and creativity. But the million dollar question is: How do you actually do that?

A clue comes from Albert Einstein, who said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” So where do we find that different kind of thinking? The kind of productive thinking that promotes different perspectives and creates new ideas? The answer can be found all around us and is readily available—in the arts.

This is not a bizarre idea by any means—there is already a firmly established and well-traveled bridge between the business world and the arts realm. Firms have hired poets to learn better communication skills for their ideas, engaged theater artists to strengthen presentation and improvisational abilities and studied the inner workings of musical ensembles—for instance, the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra—to improve their teamwork and performance. Professors at major business schools have partnered with theater directors, magicians and filmmakers.

Behind all this activity is the growing realization that companies need to foster more creative thinking, develop new leadership models and strengthen employee collaborative skills to remain profitable and competitive in a business world now driven by hyper-change and radical unpredictability.

Harvey Seifter, a pioneer in the emerging arts-based learning field, asserts that firms locked into hidebound approaches are increasingly under pressure when the economy increasingly requires a new dynamic. In a piece he wrote for the Arts & Business Council, he points to surveys that consistently identify “imagination, inspiration, inventiveness, improvisational ability, collaborative and inter-cultural skills, spontaneity, adaptability and presentation” as the most sought-after business skills.

“Corporations are focused on acquiring the skills and tools they need to tap into the creativity of their workers and unleash the creative potential of their organizations,” he wrote.

This has led to a growing number of companies engaging artists as part of their organizational learning and professional development.

For example, Michael Rose, the CEO and chairman of Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust, has demonstrated how a strategic partnership with artists can be a powerful way to stay ahead of the competition with high-net-worth clients, which include a hefty number of entrepreneurs. Metropolitan Capital positions itself as a “universal bank,” offering commercial banking, private banking, wealth management, investment banking, commercial lending and trust services. But its key offering is creativity in finance. The firm must come up with innovative services for the very specific needs of its clients. In that way, the company merges the worlds of finance and the arts and avoids the “status quo” of competitors

As part of that branding effort, the bank has chosen as its headquarters the historic Tree Studios building in Chicago, a downtown building where you would expect artist lofts and other creative enterprises. It has also launched a vibrant, well-promoted program to rotate works by prominent artists through its offices three times a year. In a Huffington Post article, “Does Business Need the Arts To Be Innovative?” Rose explained that integrating the arts into the company’s daily business life helps his employees address complex and unique client issues.

"The art forces the consciousness to explore its boundaries. It challenges us and reinforces, as a daily reminder, the value of creativity and of keeping an open mind through a daily dialogue with the work, which one can see differently on any given day."

Another company that has benefited from using arts in its approach is Angel Trains, a U.K. rail and train leasing company. The company once partnered with Oracle Computing to install a major piece of IT infrastructure over a period of 18 months. The company wanted the staffs of the two organizations, Angel and Oracle, to blend well and avoid an “us and them” mentality. In the first few weeks of the partnership, the staffs were brought together to learn to improvise through music with the help of a rock/pop/jazz ensemble. (For more music-based business applications see http://www.academy-of-rock.co.uk/teambuilding.)

Unilever, a global consumer products company, once found itself beginning to lose market share and needed to build a more entrepreneurial culture. The company started “Catalyst,” an arts-based learning program. Actors and poets were brought in to facilitate discussions. Paintings were chosen by staff. The artistic process used in the day-to-day workings of the firm encouraged employees to develop new ideas. The process is documented in a white paper, “Solving Business Problems Through the Creative Power of the Arts” by Mary-Ellen Boyle and Edward Ottensmeyer.

“I have done this for one simple reason, and that is for my division to become a better business,” said James Hill, a Unilever group vice president, in the white paper.

“I’m pretty straightforward,” he said. “I’m a 43-year-old businessman. I’ve been in a multinational company since I left the university, about 20 years, and had virtually no contact with the arts world before Catalyst started up. I had followed an extremely conventional path that had been very productive for me and very successful in many ways, but I was at a point when I wanted to see whether there were other things in life that I could explore. And I was resentful, in a way, and felt that I had been cut off from the more creative sides of life.”

Emily Lutzker, a former artist and founder of innovation consultancy OpenInvo, says that a key concept for artists is “disruption” of the status quo, one of the key things they do when they innovate.

"If you want real disruption,” she says, “start talking to artists. Disruption is central to their thinking and their value system. If you want incremental innovation, any traditional focus group can tell you how to inch forward."

If you add more innovation and creativity to your business, you enter a fascinating realm of cross-industry ideas and experience, of exploration and building of “new” industry best practices and business models and of continuous, practical learning beyond your normal borders.

It is also the single best benefit to becoming a “Founding Innovator” member of the Institute for Innovation Development.

The Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial services firms. The founding sponsor partners include Innovation Equity Partners, Pershing, Ultimus Fund Solutions, Fidelity, Meridian IQ/Advice IQ and Charter Financial Publishing (the publisher of Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines). Together, we help make innovation happen. For more information or to join the institute, click here.