Creativity and innovation in organizations: Two models and managerial implications

Abstract

Technological innovation is emerging as the single most important factor to influence business success in today's intensely competitive and dynamic environment. Accordingly, scholars as well as practitioners are contributing to a rapidly growing body of knowledge for the effective management of innovation. However, surprisingly, very little attention is being paid to the organizational and managerial issues pertaining to creativity, which is the most basic and the most critical element in the process of innovation. This paper highlights creativity as the central issue in management of innovation, and presents two models to further our understanding of the dynamics of creativity in organizational settings, and the place of creativity in the innovation process. For a comprehensive understanding of creative behavior and performance in organizations this paper develops a Multiple Perspective Model. This model includes three perspectives, the Individual, the Technical, and the Organizational, which focus respectively on the distinctive individual characteristics associated with creativity, the needed technical resources—material as well as human—for creativity, and the organizational practices and manegerial actions that aid or stifle creativity. The exposition of this model is followed by an analysis of its implications for the management of creativity. Next, a model of the innovation process is proposed, in which innovation is shown as being contingent on a cascade of creative efforts in various functional areas and across different fields of specialization. These two models are expected to be useful to both researchers and practitioners in ferreting out the issues of primary significance, nurturing creativity and enhancing innovation in organizations.