6.Creativity and Innovation Management

Creativity and Management of  Innovation

Creativity and Innovation Management Today's Organizations mainly rely on intellectual properties, and in elite  positions, creativity and innovation are the golden keys for the organizational success. The highly competitive nature of today’s business needs creative and innovative ideas for dominant success. Although good service is the essence of a successful business (in long term), novel ideas are jumping advancements; thus, a company has no chance to win this competitive game in the absence of creativity and innovation.

Innovation Management

Initially, innovation management was formed to provide an efficient managing system for Research & Development (R&D), but it has now spread far beyond this area due to the importance of innovation in various fields of business. In general, innovation management has two main duties to manage both input and output of innovative materials.

In the former case, innovation management must conduct the flow of  innovative ideas (like new discoveries) into the organization for  subsequent usages. In other words, it is needed to collect all relevant external innovations to serve the internal innovative system.

In the latter case, the internal innovation should be managed in a proper  manner. According to the customer’s needs, an organization always should have new products and services to satisfy their needs. Internal innovative system is responsible for analyzing the external needs, estimating the internal possibilities, and proposing new innovative ideas.

Creative People in Organization

Due to the importance of creativity and innovation for an organization, in a modern management, it is necessary to distinguish creative people. In general, people in technical positions, associated with elite positions (leading the organization strategy), are divided to two groups: creative  people and their assistants. This creative group is divided to two different groups namely initiators and problem solvers. The initiators are indeed creative people who "have that additional mental ability that enables them to recognize previously unrealized problems and to evaluate their importance … It is one thing to have an idea about specific problem; it is quite another to have an idea about what it is that is worth having idea about” (Hilberry 1953).

Although problem solvers are key persons in an organization (particularly in critical situations), the problems should be introduced to them, as they are not problem finders. In other words, problem solvers should follow the initiators (though not exactly the relationship of  creative people – assistants).

The initiators are also divided to two distinguishable groups’ viz. discoverers and inventors. Although these two groups are usually considered identical, they are significantly different. Discoverers work  on a higher creative position of the organization by dealing with the question “why?” for analyzing a phenomenon or a problem; but inventors serve the routine performance of the organization by struggling with the question “how” things work and can be made to work better.

It is obvious that distinguishing these creativity-based groups is an important duty of the management system, and is only possible in the light of modern aspects of creativity and innovation management.

Coaching, training or learning about creativity and innovation involves mastery of at least 12 domains. These include:

a) Creativity and Innovation differences and definitions.

Often used interchangeably, they ought to be considered separate and distinct. Creativity can be described as problem identification and idea generation and innovation idea selection, development and commercialization. Creativity can also be measured according to the number of ideas produced and their diversity and novelty.

b) Creative Types.

Are some people creative and others not? Why is it that some people just seem to be more so? Some theorists argue for creativity traits such as tolerance for ambiguity and intolerance of conformity whilst others counter that traits are hard to identify and not stable or transferable across situations. Further, motivation is more important.

c) Learning versus talent.

Is creativity a talent or can it be learned and developed? How conclusive are nature and nurture arguments and does it improve with experience? What do people who regularly have to produce good ideas have to say?

d) Motivation.

Motivation is arguably more important than traits. How can it be gauged, measured and monitored?

e) Organizational culture.

Some cultures inhibit creativity whilst others foster it? We can all be more creative so what is stopping us?

f) Organizational structure.

What properties of an organizational structure most foster creativity? There are many reasons why an entity has a particular organizational structure: history, logistics, market segmentation, product line, strategy and so forth. It is often unreasonable to ask a firm to change its organizational structure, so how do we get around this problem?

g) Team structure.

Some individuals who have worked alone have made great contributions to society. Yet many argue that smaller teams overcome the limitations of the individual. Still others argue that groups introduce negative such as groupthink and politicking, which gets worse with size. So, what is the most effective group structure for maximizing the frequency and quality of creative output?

h) Knowledge Management.

Coaches and leaders have to understand how to maximize and effectively use networks, collaboration and elicitation of tacit knowledge techniques if they are to benefit from the intellectual cross pollination that is the raw material of the idea generation process.

i) Radial versus Incremental leaps.

Everybody seems to want to make radical leaps, which has led to a distortion of the value of incremental movement. It is an understanding of incremental movement that is the surest fire way to radical movement. Large movements most often result from small changes.

 j) Structure and Goals.

Are structures and goals inhibitive or do they increase creative output? Research from people who continually output material (screenwriters, comedians, musicians) argues that structure is vital.

k) Process.

Is there a process that makes insight (also known as aha or eureka) more likely? It seems that there are triggers and processes that can be used to get the mind working on problems at various cognitive levels.

l) Valuation.

The first stage of innovation is idea selection. How do we make the go or kill decision between ideas?

References

J. Balderston, P. Birnbaum, R. Goodman, and M. Stahl, Modern Management Techniques in Engineering and R&D, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984.  N. Hilberry, Elements of Basic Research Management Philosophy at   Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois, 1953.