Experiencing Creativity in the Organization: From Individual Creativity to Collective Creativity

Abstract

Introduction In today's business world, innovations provide companies with major opportunities and advantages. Innovation can be defined as the outcome of a set of activities that use to create new value to those benefiting from its use (de Sousa, 2006). It is commonly accepted that innovations are brought forward in an interactive process of generation and application. Organizations need to generate knowledge, facilitate the sharing of knowledge, and apply the so that the organization can generate innovation. Innovative organizations use creatively. Creativity is the component that enhances the organizations' ability to retain their competitive advantage as well as to stay ahead of their competitors. For this type of organizations, the ideas and insights of their employees are of crucial importance. However, much innovation potential remains unexploited because organizations assign the responsibility of getting new and implementable ideas only to the RD Chesbrough, 2003; Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2001). To remain competitive, organizations need their employees to be actively involved in their work and try to generate novel and suitable products, processes, and approaches (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). Many achievements in companies involve collaboration between many creative individuals, each with varying knowledge, skills, life experience, perspectives, and expertise. These kinds of collectives can tackle multi-faceted challenges that cannot be met individually. Nowadays we do not only speak about individual creativity but also about collective creativity (Hargadon & Beckhy, 2006; Sawyer, 2006). Collective creativity can be defined as creative processes leading to creative products that are the results of interaction between two or more people. In collective creativity, it is impossible to trace the source of new ideas to an individual. Instead, creative activity emerges from the collaboration and contribution of many individuals, thereby blurring the contribution of specific individuals in ideas. In this study, the focus is on investigating the concepts of creativity and collective creativity in the context of promoting the employees' creativeness and innovativeness. The research problem is: how to enhance collective creativity in the organization. The research questions are: how do the employees themselves perceive creativity in their work place, and in what way would they support creativity and especially collective creativity in the organization? The case study is based on empirical data from an action research based process conducted in one private company. The Creation of New Knowledge An organization's success and survival depend on its capability to create new and then innovation. Knowledge is an organization's most valuable resource because it embodies intangible assets, routines, and creative processes that are difficult to imitate. According to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and rapidly include it in new products. These characteristics define a knowledge creating company, whose business consists solely of continuous innovation. The key to success in a company is to build the intellectual capital that will create core competencies and distinctive products that will lead to superior results. Everybody is a worker in a company, where inventing new is a way of behaving. The central activity of a knowledge-creating company is to make personal available to others. This takes place continuously and at all levels of an organization. A constructivist view of focuses on the intraorganizational processes through which new is generated and has highlighted the importance of both social practices within which new is created and social interaction through which new emerges (Tsoukas, 2009). …