Curiosity and creativity are a competitive advantage to build

Creative thinking, curiosity and lifelong learning are becoming hard currency in the labour market of 2030. The World Economic Forum’s New Economy Skills report highlights the human advantage, and Nordic Business Forum has also raised the human edge as a differentiator.

Creativity can be trained, believe it or not. One theory describes three ingredients: domain-relevant skills, creative-thinking processes and intrinsic motivation. Creativity is not only a spark of inspiration. It is a mechanism, tightly connected to curiosity.

People who explore more, ask more and are comfortable ‘not yet knowing’ create space for more original solutions. But curiosity does not feel the same in every situation.

I’m endlessly curious about new technology, new tools and new ways of solving a problem. That kind of curiosity costs me nothing: no risk, just an interesting gap I want to close.

Curiosity about people is different for me. Even though I hate to admit it, asking strangers about their background is not my comfort zone. I suspect I’m not the only one. It can take a willingness to tolerate social stress: asking a question despite the risk of feeling exposed, or making someone else feel exposed.

The encouraging part is that curiosity can also be trained. Leaders who visibly ask questions and admit their own gaps can help make it safer for others to do the same. I’ve seen this so many times: when people can acknowledge what they do not know, learning and creative problem-solving have more room to happen.

For me, the real shift happens when a company starts treating creativity, continuous learning and curiosity as a competitive advantage to be built — not a nice extra, or a quality we hope people already have.

What if we measured creativity and curiosity with the same importance as we measure EBITDA or revenue today?