Managing for creativity in consulting engineering

Abstract

The rapid pace of technological advancement has resulted in profound structural changes in the American economy, in a moving away from an industrial society towards an information society. The knowledge worker and knowledge industry are replacing traditional manufacturing industry as we place lesser weight on the product of the human hand and greater weight on “information,” the product of the human mind. On the management side, increasing world-wide competition and rapidly changing international markets have brought about a pervasive management imperative to maximize short-term returns at the expense of long-term organizational viability. In the process, we tend to overlook our most valuable resource — the creative talents of our work force, our human capital. As economic conditions change, so do opportunities for innovation. To be effective, managers in consulting engineering firms must reflect the fluid environment within which innovation takes place. They must learn to create an organizational climate which motivates and supports their engineering teams to recognize, develop and utilize creative abilities so as to enhance the quality of service to clients, productivity, profits and their science and technology and times for innovation in society and our organizational systems. We soon will enter another time of organizational innovation in which engineering management must find ways to let more engineering professionals make a creative, innovative and rewarding contribution to the quality of their organizational experience and professional career development. To examine how this can be accomplished, this paper explores in considerable depth the theories and terminology of creativity, the current research, the characteristics of creative professionals and organizations, techniques for creative thinking, a generalized model for understanding creative innovation, the measurement of creativity, and culminates with a case study application in a consulting engineering organization.