Developing radical innovation capabilities: Exploring the effects of training employees for creativity and innovation

Abstract

The resilience of organizations is increasingly dependent on their ability to develop radical innovation capabilities. While the literature documents numerous cases of organizations that already have radical innovation capabilities, the question of organizational devices that can be used to stimulate the emergence of such capabilities remains poorly addressed. Specifically, training for innovation and creativity has been proposed as a means to foster innovation capabilities; however, there has been little empirical evidence concerning the long‐term impacts of such training. To fill this gap, this article aims to document and evaluate the efforts of the research institute of a major Canadian energy company to provide training for innovation and creativity to initiate a radical innovation capability. We rely on a longitudinal study over the span of 18 months, where we observed 128 h of training and conducted 70 semi‐structured interviews with a sample of 40 researchers. We found that training for creativity and innovation has the potential to develop individual creative skills for exploration, to catalyze and federate collective action through common methods and a shared sense of what innovation entails, and to help create a common language and vocabulary between the different groups or divisions of an organization to talk about exploration.