Assessing Organisational Creativity: An Innovative Benchmarking Approach

Organisational creativity remains an ill-defined concept. Studies have failed to arrive at a convincing general theory of creativity and, more recently, attention has turned to the possibilities of middle-range theories in which creativity is treated as a context-specific phenomenon. A new approach for exploring the nature of creativity of organisations is reported with preliminary empirical results. The method draws on signalling theory applied to a database of companies generated from citations and executive nominations. Companies such as 3M, IBM, Sony, Disney and Proctor & Gamble were found to yield strong and frequent signals over extended time periods. Strong signals have also been detected from younger firms such as Microsoft, Virgin and Nike. The approach offers the possibility of industry-specific benchmarking for corporate creativity, and for testing the relationship between an organisation's creativity, innovativeness and other change-related features.