Creativity-Innovation Cycle for Organisational Exploration and Exploitation: Lessons from Neowiz - a Korean Internet Company

Abstract

This article is about a Korean Internet company that has successfully changed its major service items three times during its 10-year history. The company has been well known for innovativeness since it became the first in the world to develop and sell completely virtual products. By introducing breakthrough innovations, as well as a stream of successive minor innovations, the company has become a leader in highly contested market segments. To explain the company's success, we develop a creativity-innovation cycle with four elements: generating creative ideas from employees, communicating these ideas, implementing them, and learning from the market response. We argue that tight, successive connections of the four elements allowed the company to take advantage of its existing core competencies and execute breakthrough innovations. We explain how the company made the cycle as complete as possible and discuss lessons other companies can learn from the case.