Full summary of the material of every week of the course Strategy & Innovation Management (lectures and articles). Course started in week 2, no lecture or mandatory articles in week 6.
Week 2: Creativity
2.1 The basics of creativity
• ‘’Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new
associations between existing ideas or concepts.’’
• Creativity is important because it’s necessary for coming up with new ideas.
• An idea is creative when it is novel and meaningful (Amabile, 1983). Highly creative when it’s
also transformational (breakthrough in thinking), condensed and simple (easy to understand)
and when it has elaboration and synthesis (elegant and well-crafted).
• An idea can be uncreative at the start but turn out to be creative in the end, think of simple
chords turned into a good song.
• Creativity has multiple levels:
o Creative person
o Creative process (procedures used to develop the product)
o Creative product (new & meaningful product)
o Organizational creativity (organization creates valuable & new product)
• Myths about creativity:
o It’s a skill that you either have or don’t have.
o You can’t learn to be creative.
o You can’t teach others to be creative.
o It belongs to art, not to business.
• Myths about managing creativity:
o Money is a creativity motivator.
o Time pressure fuels creativity.
o Creating fear (threat of dismissal) leads to breakthroughs.
o Competition beats collaboration. (Internal competition is bad for creativity because
employees will stop sharing their ideas with each other, that way the pieces of the
puzzle can’t come together. Collaboration is essential!)
o A streamlined organization is a creative organization.
• Causes of not being creative:
o Fear of change
o Fear of failure
o Fear of more work
o Fear of criticism
o Fear of losing control
▪ Why would we change everything now we have everything under control,
things could go wrong…
• Divergent thinking is when you think of many ideas. Convergent thinking is when you choose
the best idea. Divergent thinking is often linked to creativity.
,2.2 Steps of innovation (Perry-Smith & Mannucci paper)
• Creativity vs innovation:
o Creativity is the generation of novel and meaningful ideas (Amabile, 1983).
o Innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas (Amabile, 2000).
• When does creativity lead to innovation? (Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017)
1. Idea generation: Generating creative ideas and selecting the best one, needed is
cognitive flexibility!
2. Idea elaboration: Evaluating the creative idea’s potential and developing it, needed is
support from the organization!
3. Idea championing: Promoting the creative idea and getting the resources to
implement it, needed is influence and legitimacy!
4. Idea implementation: Converting the creative idea into a tangible outcome
(innovation), needed is a shared vision and understanding!
• How tie strength view & network structure view stimulate creativity (Perry-Smith &
Mannucci, 2017):
o Strength of strong ties (family, friends, colleagues who are friends):
▪ Strong ties provide mutual understanding, motivation and solidarity benefits
by sharing information that could be creatively destructing (Coleman, 1988).
o Strength of weak ties (acquaintances, co-workers, social media influencers):
▪ Access to weak ties helps with getting access to nonredundant information,
access to strong ties leads to sharing or redundant information (similar and
overlapping) (Granovetter, 1973).
o Network closure & structural holes
▪ Dense networks (high network closure) have few structural holes (network of
B). Networks can have structural holes between two individuals who have
complementary, nonredundant, information (network of A). Individuals can
gain power by fulfilling the brokerage (tussenpersoon) role because they link
otherwise disconnected persons (person A).
• Both views agree that access to nonredundant information facilitates creativity (Perry-Smith
& Mannucci, 2017):
, 2.3 Managing creativity
• Social influence (facilitation & rewards) is more important in creative task settings than in
daily task settings, because it promotes creative thinking and stimulates the generation of
ideas that will be brought to the group and subsequently to the organization (Woodman,
Sawyer and Griffin, 1993).
• Important characteristics:
Individual Group
Cognitive style and ability: divergent thinking Characteristics:
and ideational fluency Transactional/transformational leadership,
longevity & cohesiveness inverted U-shape
Personality factors: self-esteem and locus of Processes: approaches to problem solving
control (brainstorming, mind mapping, etc.)
Knowledge: specific domain-related or Composition: Diversity and size
creativity-related
Motivation: intrinsic
• Group has diversity from inside (different educational and experience backgrounds) and
diversity from outside which brings divergence in ideas and new nonredundant knowledge.
• So, managing creativity is possible and depends on (Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin, 1993):
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