Developing a community involves far less creativity than you imagine.
In fact, creativity can be bad. It involves guessing and hoping rather than following a refined process to get desired results.
Take the community concept. Very often a concept is derived through a creative, brainstorming, process. This is bad.
For example, a community for frequent travellers between London and New York to share tips. That’s creative. It also cost £1m+ and failed spectacularly.
If they had had a process for interviewing their audience, gathering data, knowing not what they wanted but what they would actually connect around, they would’ve launched a community with a concept that exploded to life.
If you follow your data, you come to the right answers. You don’t need some ball-throwing brainstorming process.
If you get the data-driven process for analyzing a community right, it’s far easier to develop a community.