Creativity and Culture in Organizations

Abstract

Organizational culture is averse to innovation. Some organizations are dedicated to creativity as a business (e.g. advertising, cinema or design): they nevertheless apply the classic production rules of labour division, specialism, incremental innovation and evaluation by demand. Creativity applied to organizations themselves, or to in-house processes, is tricky because organizations are by nature averse to change. There, creativity is confronted to a double bind: the injunction to set up something new but within the current rules and culture of the organization. Organizations are “installations” where the culture is distributed within three layers (built environment, embodied competences in members, institutional rules). The innovator jeopardizes the current state of things and hard-won compromises in this installation. That is an uncomfortable position and the fate of many innovators is tragic because they are troublemakers; often also they remain unrecognized. Unlike some other domains, creativity in organizations cannot be individual. We will describe in this chapter the nature of the double bind faced by creativity and innovation in large organizations and list some current solutions.