The Role of Creativity in the Management of Innovation

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• About the Editors
• Acknowledgments
• Contents

Creativity is a vibrant field of scientific research with important applied implications for the management of innovation. In this chapter, we argue that the proliferation of creativity research has led to positive and less positive outcomes and discuss five relevant research themes. We first introduce our readers to the different proposed dimensions of a creative object. Next, we explain recent developments on the level of the creativity magnitude issue. Based on this, we review how researchers currently operationalize creativity. After discussing how creativity is conceptualized and operationalized, we outline how it might be enhanced. Finally, we present an overview of the wide variety of methodological approaches currently used in creativity research. We close by calling for more interdisciplinary research and offering other suggestions for future directions.

There are several theoretical models that explore how creativity fits into innovation. Much of this research emphasizes the importance of management taking on a supporting and encouraging role. In this paper, we argue that managers are the primary connection between creativity and innovation in organizations and are able to influence both through managerial leadership behaviors. The theoretical models that have been developed to date do not present a practical and comprehensive categorization of how managers do this across the primary areas of influences in their organizations: individual, teams, and organization. This paper will conceptualize how managers can enable creativity and innovation based on a broad categorization of influences and develop specific components to be utilized in order to conduct research studies focused on understanding these specific behaviors as a distinct aspect of managerial leadership.

In this paper, I examine three questions: (1) how creativity and innovation in organisations are defined in the scientific literature, (2) which theories are applied and hence which explanatory factors have been discussed, and (3) what the empirical evidence is regarding these factors. I uncover an overlap between the definitions of creativity and innovation, which in my view are distinct but related concepts. Further, despite the significant overlap in their definitions, research has evolved in two almost separate streams. Moreover, I observe that the multiple theories used (even regarding the same factor) to explain organisational creativity are not always integrated and that the empirical evidence about factors concerning individuals seems to converge but is much more mixed in relation to factors at the organisational level. Finally, I propose a new definition of organisational creativity and organisational innovation to distinguish them and suggest some avenues for future research.

This paper describes and discusses how innovation impacts creativity in the advertising sector. It points to the double meaning of creativity — as innovativeness and as artistic skills — and indicates a tension between the two. Empirical illustrations consist of two case studies from the advertising sector. These point to how innovations (in terms of adaptation of new technology) negatively impact artistic creativity. Contextual factors creating a need for new technology did have an impact, and meant that companies became increasingly competitive and roles became unclear. On the company level, innovation caused knowledge gaps, increased formalization, and expanded the division of work. Contribution is made to research on the management of creativity by suggesting how innovation impacts artistic creativity. Furthermore, the discussion on company level creativity contributes to research on the advertising sector, since the literature has foremost discussed creative processes of individual campaigns.

This chapter aims at a better understanding of the impacts training for innovative design could have on organizational creativity. It clarifies the usefulness of innovative design theories in creative contexts, and constructs an analytical framework relating three dimensions of training for innovative design and organizational creativity: concept-relevant skills, collective creativity-relevant processes, and innovation-intrinsic motivation. It bears on a longitudinal study conducted in the framework of a large organization that implements training for innovative design: Hydro-Québec research center. Our results show that transformation by the training allows participants to develop new capacities for innovative design reasoning and increase the potential of collaborative creativity within the firm.

Creativity is central to the success of new firms and entrepreneurs. Previous research have focused on factors affecting the ideation process during new product development, but there is a need for insight into factors that influence entrepreneurial creativity in a broader sense by focusing on creativity of the business idea. In this paper, we review literature on creativity, absorptive capacity and incubator tenancy and develop propositions about the relationships between these three concepts. Specifically, we propose that entrepreneurs will benefit from business incubators by increasing their absorptive capacity, which in turn will have a positive effect on business idea creativity.

Companies develop co-creation platforms to collect innovative ideas generated by consumers. The idea competition model is traditionally used to organise such collective action and has been widely implemented by companies. In parallel, the development of collaborative platforms and social networks have led to the appearance of co-creation platforms based on a cooperation model with community features. In addition to these two classical models, a third model, a combination of competition and cooperation — the coopetition model — has emerged. Although there is growing interest in this model, no study to date has compared its performance to the other two models. Our research objective is to investigate and compare how these three models affect creative performance in terms of idea quantity and quality. We thus conducted an experiment with 177 students to generate ideas that were submitted to an established company. The results show that the coopetition model generates more ideas and more creative ideas than the other two models. We also offer insights on how a consumer co-creation platform should be designed to achieve better creative performance.

We posit that self-beliefs have important implications for creativity and innovation. Specifically, we provide conceptual definitions for creative self-efficacy, creative identity, creative mindsets, and creative metacognition and explain why these self-beliefs play an important role in the creativity and innovation process. In addition, we discuss the empirical literature supporting our argument that self-beliefs are relevant for researchers and practitioners wanting to: (1) understand the creativity and innovation process in general and (2) facilitate the generation and implementation of novel and useful business ideas. Lastly, we suggest some applied implications of self-beliefs for managers and researchers wishing to conduct intervention studies.

This study examined the influence of others’ smiles on individuals’ creativity. According to popular belief, individuals get motivated to be more creative when others smile at them. In contrast, we hypothesised that smiles would make avoidance-oriented (versus approach-oriented) individuals less creative, as they may lose the motivation to pursue further novelty once they gain social approval, as implied by a smile. Forty-two participants were paired with a same-sex stranger and randomly assigned to the role of either an “illustrator” or a “commentator.” The illustrators performed the Alien Drawing Task and the commentators gave feedbacks regarding the drawing, which were repeated six times and videorecorded. As expected, the results showed significant interaction effects between others’ smiles and avoidance orientation on creativity: participants high in avoidance orientation showed less creativity when others smiled at them. In addition, nodding had the same effect as a smile did, confirming that social approval decreases the creativity of avoidance-oriented individuals.

The ability of continuously generating new products is essential for a company’s long-term success. In fact, every innovation starts with a creative idea. A common approach to generate ideas that are especially creative — i.e. new and useful —is the use of creativity techniques. Despite the existence of more than a hundred of such techniques, only few are popular in business practice, e.g. brainstorming, brainwriting, and TRIZ. Moreover, at first sight, empirical research on creativity techniques is scarce while concentrating on brainstorming in all of its forms. Therefore, this article systematically reviews the existing body of empirical research on creativity techniques in general. Furthermore, we describe and investigate the most noted techniques. Thereby, we provide insights on the development of the scientific literature in that field. Additionally, by highlighting the latest research findings, we give helpful hints for practitioners interested in applying creativity techniques.

In several industries, competitive and societal factors have highlighted the need for incubating dedicated radical innovation (RI) capabilities. Traditional approaches to RI strategies have often emphasised either organisational or cognitive aspects, but tend to overlook how these dimensions interact within the organisation. This paper tackles the issue of these interplays by investigating the effects of a creativity-based collaborative method, the KCP Workshops, on the RI capability of a firm. We present an in-depth case study of a leading aeronautics firm that adopted the method to face its RI challenges. While being consistent with prior research and underscoring the impact of organisational settings on creative cognitive processes, our analysis empirically demonstrates a triple capability developed through the KCP Workshops: (1) collectively building a conceivable RI strategy, (2) deploying a monitoring process adapted to the exploration of cognitive breakthroughs, (3) collectively building “emerging creative organisations” at the ecosystem level to support the development of RI strategy. Beyond the performance of the RI capability for commercial applications, these findings underline how the collective design of an RI strategy also involves players in the exploration and establishment of organisational innovations.

A significant part of management in creative organisations is the discovery, development, and engagement of the creative talents. These activities require practices at the intersection of talent management, knowledge management and HR management. In this paper, we observed a bootcamp held at Cirque du Soleil in order to experiment with new casting and training practices for a scarce and specific occupational creative community: clowns. Our study shows that this bootcamp provides context at the borders of distinct practices: recruitment, training, and exploration. This intermediary zone allows the emergence of a boundary practice: the co-construction of what actors of the organisation and members of the communities do, make and learn to connect, create and understand new meaning of their shared reality in performance and exploration. This concept contributes to an improved understanding of the management of scarce talents in knowledge-and-creativity intensive fields, as hi-tech industries, software development, engineering, or creative industries.

The topic of this paper is user ideation within front-end innovation. We present and discuss an approach which we refer to as “Imagine that… ”. With “Imagine that… ” users tell stories of how they imagine they will use a future IT system. The oral stories are captured online using a remote, unmoderated software tool. The distinguishing characteristics of the “Imagine that… ” approach are: (1) that the users ideate while on their own and therefore without being influenced by an interviewer/moderator and (2) that they come up with the design ideas and scenarios themselves rather than provide feedback on already developed design sketches, mock-ups, etc. The study contributes to the innovation literature by describing how and why narrative theory can be used to support the user’s ability to think creatively about future use. Our research also contributes to method development by showing that it is possible to obtain user input of relevance for the early stages of innovation in a fast, frugal way and unmoderated way.