Harnessing Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace
Knowledge Solutions
September 2009 | 61
Creativity plays a critical role in the innovation process, and innovation that markets value is a creator and sustainer of performance and change. In organizations, stimulants and obstacles to creativity drive or impede enterprise.
Harnessing Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace1
By Olivier Serrat Introduction
Creativity has always been at the heart of human endeavor. Allied to innovation, which creates unexpected value, it is now recognized as central to organizational performance. (Some hold that the capacity to harness intellectual and social capital—and to convert that into novel and appropriate things—has become the critical organizational requirement of the age.) The shift to knowledge economies has been abrupt and there is a flurry of interest in creativity and innovation in the workplace. Innovation is considered, quite simply, an imperative for organizational survival. It may even be the key to some of the biggest challenges facing the world, such as global warming and sustainable development. Notwithstanding, we are still far from a theory of organizational creativity: the avenues for promising research that might contribute to its emergence are innumerable because of the increasing use of systems approaches and the growing number of agents involved in knowledge flows.2 There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns. —Edward de Bono 1
2
These Knowledge Solutions do not discuss intellectual property, the new knowledge that arises out of the innovation process, nor the management systems that identify, protect, value, manage, and audit an organization’s intellectual property, e.g., copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc. Usefully, given the plethora of opportunities, systemized research might cover four distinct stages: (i) ideas capture, (ii) growth and development,
September 2009 | 61
Creativity plays a critical role in the innovation process, and innovation that markets value is a creator and sustainer of performance and change. In organizations, stimulants and obstacles to creativity drive or impede enterprise.
Harnessing Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace1
By Olivier Serrat Introduction
Creativity has always been at the heart of human endeavor. Allied to innovation, which creates unexpected value, it is now recognized as central to organizational performance. (Some hold that the capacity to harness intellectual and social capital—and to convert that into novel and appropriate things—has become the critical organizational requirement of the age.) The shift to knowledge economies has been abrupt and there is a flurry of interest in creativity and innovation in the workplace. Innovation is considered, quite simply, an imperative for organizational survival. It may even be the key to some of the biggest challenges facing the world, such as global warming and sustainable development. Notwithstanding, we are still far from a theory of organizational creativity: the avenues for promising research that might contribute to its emergence are innumerable because of the increasing use of systems approaches and the growing number of agents involved in knowledge flows.2 There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns. —Edward de Bono 1
2
These Knowledge Solutions do not discuss intellectual property, the new knowledge that arises out of the innovation process, nor the management systems that identify, protect, value, manage, and audit an organization’s intellectual property, e.g., copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc. Usefully, given the plethora of opportunities, systemized research might cover four distinct stages: (i) ideas capture, (ii) growth and development,