Creativity and Innovation for Managers

Similarly, Toyota manufactures better cars than its competitors. Both Apple and Toyota successfully adapt breakthrough innovations for the market.

Creativity and Innovation for Managers

This has helped the company come up with disruptive ideas that nobody had even thought of before, like autonomous cars and Google Maps. The efficacy of all the major blocks of innovation such as choosing the area of focus, generating ideas, evaluating, shortlisting and executing can be improved by creating a rigid framework for management.

Thus, innovation can and should be managed just like any other business process. Horizon 1 H1 innovations: Satabdi Mukherjee is a freelance writer with a special interest in business and technology. She likes to stay informed about the latest developments around the world and considers herself an information junkie. Want to make innovation the driving force behind your business? Subscribe to our Innovation blog. The fascinating story of Giffgaff: How companies are innovating in the energy sector Innovation Management. Distributed shared ledger technolog What is change management and why is it essenti A pulled process, by contrast, is based on finding areas where customers' needs are not met and finding solutions to those needs.

Innovation, although not sufficient, is a necessary prerequisite for the continued survival and development of enterprises. The most direct way of business innovation is through technological innovation , disruptive innovation or social innovation. Management of innovation, however, plays a significant role in promoting technological and institutional innovation. The goal of innovation management within a company is to cultivate a suitable environment to encourage innovation. Innovation is often a technological change that outperforms a previous practice.

To lead or sustain with innovations, managers need to concentrate heavily on the innovation network, which requires deep understanding of the complexity of innovation. Collaboration is an important source of innovation. Innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected according to their comparative advantages, and operating in a coordinated manner.

When a technology goes through a major transformation phase and yields a successful innovation, it becomes a great learning experience, not only for the parent industry but other industries as well. Big innovations are generally the outcome of intra- and interdisciplinary networking among technological sectors, along with combination of implicit and explicit knowledge. Networking is required, but network integration is the key to success for complex innovation. Social economic zones, technology corridors, free trade agreements , and technology clusters are some of the ways to encourage organizational networking and cross-functional innovations.

Antonio Hidalgo and Jose Albor proposed the use of typologies as an innovation management tool. These typologies were found by looking at 32 characteristics [12] that classify Innovation Management Tools. Hidalgo and Albors were able to narrow the list down to 8 criteria knowledge-driven focus, strategic impact, degree of availability, level of documentation, practical usefulness, age of the IMT, required resources for implementation, measurability , that are especially relevant for IMTs in the knowledge-driven economy knowledge economy.

The advantage of using typologies is the easy integration of new methods and the availability of a broader scope of tools.

1st Edition

Criteria for selection of tools: IMTs that were sufficiently developed and standardized, that aimed to improve the competitiveness of firms by focusing on knowledge and that were freely accessible on the market and not subject to any copyright or licensing agreement. In economic theory, the management of innovation has been studied by Philippe Aghion and Jean Tirole According to this theory, the optimal allocation of property rights helps to alleviate the hold-up problem an underinvestment problem that occurs when investments are non-contractible.

In contrast, Aghion and Tirole argue that in the relationship between a research unit and a customer the parties might not agree on the optimal ownership structure, since research units are often cash-constrained and thus cannot make up-front payments to customers. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Business administration Management of a business Accounting.

Management accounting Financial accounting Financial audit. Cooperative Corporation Limited liability company Partnership Sole proprietorship State-owned enterprise. As a result, most of the work on mathematical creativity assessment cannot be easily applied to related domains such as engineering. Cropley and Cropley , , b have sought to address this gap in creativity research by focusing on novel products that serve some useful social purpose, labeling their special quality functional creativity.

They argued that novelty seems intuitively to take precedence over usefulness in determining creativity. However, in the practical world of products, processes, systems, and services, the most important aspect of an artifact that excites admiration in the beholder is the product's ability to meet customer needs, i. An automobile, for example, must transport people quickly, economically and comfortably over long distances. If it fails to satisfy requirements like these, then it lacks effectiveness and thus cannot be regarded as creative, no matter how novel it is. Einstein, however, argued that it is not difficult to find novel solutions to problems that achieve the desired effect: The difficult part is finding solutions that are elegant see Miller, Grudin reinforced this idea when he referred to the grace of great things [emphasis added].

Such solutions not infrequently cause a more or less instantaneous "shock of recognition" when they occur, and provoke a "why didn't I think of that? A product may introduce a new way of conceptualizing an area, for instance, by opening up new approaches to existing problems, or by drawing attention to the existence of previously unnoticed problems.

Cropley and Cropley classified creative products using the four dimensions listed above. They arranged them in a hierarchy ranging from the "routine" product characterized by effectiveness alone at one pole, to the "innovative" product characterized by effectiveness, novelty, elegance and genesis at the other, with "original" and "elegant" products between these poles. This classification system is shown in Table 1 , where a plus sign means that a property is necessary for this kind of product, a minus sign that it is not. The schematic in Table 1 can also be used to demonstrate the position of pseudo- and quasi-creativity: The table shows that as a product moves from routine to innovative, it incorporates all the properties of products at lower levels, but adds something to them.

It is important to stress that routine products should not be dismissed out of hand.

They may be very useful: In areas such as engineering, for example, a very large number of products perform important functions that benefit humankind and contribute to the advancement of society i. However, because they lack novelty their creativity is qualitatively different. Changes to these products, rather than representing functional creativity, may instead take the form of replication - that is, minor adaptations to existing ideas Sternberg et al, that develop what already exists according to existing lines of thought.

It is only when products move beyond repetition and effectiveness, and begin to incorporate novelty, that they enter the realm of creativity. The hierarchical organization of products shown in Table 1 introduces a further important principle into the discussion: Creativity is not an all-or-nothing quality of a product - there are both levels and kinds of creativity.

Creativity and Innovation for Managers: 1st Edition (Paperback) - Routledge

Creativity is not something that products either have or do not have. Different products can have creativity to greater or lesser degrees, or they can display different kinds of it. Beghetto, Kaufman, and Baxter in press give the metaphor of the all-or-nothing viewpoint as envisaging creativity as a simple light switch; in more recent years, most theorists have embraced the view of creativity more as a dimmer switch.

To serve as the basis of an instrument for measuring the creativity of products, and therefore as a tool for facilitating effective product innovation management, the internal and external properties outlined in the previous section would have to be recognizable to observers. The most straightforward way of checking whether people really can recognize creativity when they see it is to ask them.

This idea is the basis of the method of consensual assessment for a summary, see Amabile, Amabile, along with her colleagues, has developed and refined this approach. The method involves asking judges, usually experts in the field to which the product belongs, to rate the creativity of a product. When people are asked to rate the creativity of products in a global way, novices typically show much lower levels of reliability than experts Kaufman et al, ; Lee, Lee and Young, Novices' ratings also tend to have a low correlation with expert ratings Hickey, ; Kaufman et al, , although in more accessible domains the correlation rises Kaufman, Baer and Cole, Quasi-experts such as advanced students often represent a middle group; their ratings often correlate with both novices and experts Hekkert and van Wieringen, ; Plucker et al, The need for experts arising from this inconsistency among novices highlights a limitation of the Consensual Assessment Technique.

It can be expensive to obtain multiple expert raters , cumbersome all products must be viewed separately by the experts , and time consuming. What is needed is an approach that can be applied quickly and easily by a range of observers, with a high level of consensus. The present article outlines such an approach. The functional model of creativity outlined above Cropley and Cropley, provides a number of broad properties of products that can be used to describe the level and kind of creativity they possess. The question that arises at this point is that of the observable characteristics of products that reveal the presence of these properties.

We refer to such characteristics as "indicators" of creativity. Scales developed by psychologists for rating the creativity of products help to develop a basis for developing relatively concrete indicators of the functional creativity of products. An early example is Taylor's Creative Product Inventory, which measured the dimensions: More recently, Besemer and O'Quin's Creative Product Semantic Scale defined the creativity of products in terms of three dimensions: Novelty the product is original, surprising and germinal , Resolution the product is valuable, logical, useful, and understandable , and Elaboration and Synthesis the product is organic, elegant, complex, and well-crafted.

In the literature of product innovation, similar indicators are found. Goldenberg and Mazursky report on research that has found the observable characteristics of creativity in products to include "original, of value, novel, interesting, elegant, unique, surprising. Criteria such as hedonics or elegance are reminiscent of Jackson and Messick's distinction between internal criteria such as logic, harmony among the elements of the product, pleasingness, and external criteria i.

The indicators suggested by Taylor and Besemer and O'Quin give greater weight to internal criteria such as elegance, complexity or logic. They involve a mixture of pure aesthetic, formalist, and technical properties see Slater, , whereas they vary in the level of openness or closedness they display. By contrast, the "propulsion model" Sternberg, ; Sternberg, Kaufman and Pretz , turns directly to external indicators.

According to them, a creative product achieves its external effect by propelling a field.

• Introduction to Partial Differential Equations: From Fourier Series to Boundary-Value Problems (Dover Books on Mathematics)!
• Manager > Creativity & Innovation.
• Handbook of Radioactivity Analysis!
• creativity.
• Touched by a Rose.
• Servicios Personalizados!

They suggested a number of ways in which this can occur: Savransky also discussed the processes through which existing knowledge leads to effective novelty in the external world: Cropley and Cropley enriched their hierarchical, four-criterion model of functional creativity with the indicators described above to define a Creative Solution Diagnosis Scale CSDS. The Creative Solution Diagnosis Scale CSDS was developed on the basis of a theoretical framework for product creativity, namely the concept of functional creativity Cropley and Cropley, , enriched by a set of indicators drawn from the literature of product creativity.

Three trials of the CSDS have been undertaken and offer some insight into the utility of the proposed scale. In a pilot-study using the item CSDS Cropley and Cropley b reported that a small group of 13 teachers 9 women and 4 men aged from the early 20s to the early 50s used these indicators to assess the creativity of models of wheeled vehicles, designed and built by students, had no difficulty understanding as well as applying the indicators, agreed among themselves inter-rater agreement , and achieved a reasonable test-retest reliability of 0.

In a more substantial study of the usefulness of the criteria and indicators defined in the CSDS, Haller, Courvoisier and Cropley used them to rate different designs for a novel, hands-free mobile phone holder made by 55 visual art students at two colleges in Switzerland. These designs were rated by a total of 10 experts design teachers at the schools in question.

The designs were also rated by 5 novices people with no expertise in design. The median reliability Cronbach's a of the overall scores assigned by the 15 judges, for the different designs, was 0. Coefficients for the reliability of the total scores for the novice raters ranged from 0. These findings suggest that long and highly focused experience in the area of design i. Most recently, Cropley and Kaufman in press reported on the application of the CSDS by non-experts, who used the scale to rate a series of five mousetrap designs.

In a sample of participants, each rating five designs, the study found a high level of inter-rater reliability 0. However, to serve as the basis for a reliable, valid measure of product creativity, and to make a concrete contribution to enhancing the effectiveness of product innovation management, further empirical evidence is needed to demonstrate that the CSDS has high reliability, and yields a valid measure of product creativity.

The remaining sections of this paper report on a new study undertaken to test the validity and reliability of the CSDS. Building on the results of previous studies that used the CSDS to rate a variety of products a new study was undertaken examine the validity and reliability of the CSDS. The item CSDS used by Cropley and Kaufman in press was reapplied to a new, larger, group of participants, rating the same five mousetrap designs. Participants took part in the study online for extra credit.

[Webinar] Building a culture of sustainable innovation

The sample included participants who identified as female The most common age group was years old, The demographic breakdown of the sample was as follows: Participants were directed to a website where the measures were hosted online. Participants were presented, sequentially, with an image of one of five different mousetraps of varying designs stimuli Images of the mousetraps were selected from Google image search to represent a diverse range of possible mousetraps see Appendix One for descriptions. Each item was rated using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from "not at all" through "somewhat" to "very much" to indicate the degree to which the CSDS item applies to the given mousetrap.

In addition, each item was rated using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from "not at all" through "somewhat" to "very much" to indicate how creative, overall, each mousetrap was. Participants were asked to complete a basic demographic questionnaire, debriefed, and given extra credit when applicable for their participation. The total number of replaced missing values was therefore 0. The consistency among the participants was evaluated with Cronbach's coefficient alpha Cronbach, Coefficient alpha is a standard measure of internal consistency and has been used in creativity research as a measure of inter-rater reliability, treating raters as items see Kaufman et al, Confirmatory Factor Analysis CFA involves the specification and estimation of one or more possible models of a factor structure - that is, a structure that relates an underlying construct, in this case Functional Creativity, to a set of variables individual measures, or items.

Any given model such as that proposed for the CSDS, see table 3 proposes a set of latent variables factors to account for covariances among a set of observed variables Bagozzi, ; Bollen, CFA requires a priori designation of plausible factor patterns from previous theoretical or empirical work; these plausible alternative models are then explicitly tested statistically against sample data. Principle Axis Factoring was selected as the extraction method for its ability to examine shared variance and to uncover the structure of the underlying variables.

An Oblimin rotation was used for its assumption that correlations exist between the items of the CSDS as they are all hypothesized to be aspects of product creativity , in contrast to a Varimax rotation which assumes that items are uncorrelated. These tests indicated that the data were suitable for factor analysis Norussis, This criterion is consistent with accepted values see, for example, Comrey and Lee, In the present study the factor analysis was commenced with all 30 CSDS items.

Can creativity and innovation be managed?

In addition to rating the artifacts using the CSDS, respondents also gave a rating of overall creativity for each artifact. A stepwise linear regression was conducted for the dataset with Overall Creativity as the dependent variable, and the 27 items of the revised CSDS after exclusion of three redundant items indicated by the confirmatory factor analysis as independent variables.

The consistency of raters was examined for each individual mousetrap and for the entire dataset, with the following results for coefficient alpha Table 4: The consistency of the raters was uniformly high across both the individual stimuli and the entire dataset. The reported values fall into in the excellent range Nunnally and Bernstein, As a result of the high reliability of scores across all mousetraps, ratings for the five different stimuli were combined for the purpose of a confirmatory factor analysis of the CSDS.

Scale reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha to assess the mean inter-item correlations. For the purpose of this analysis a matrix of responses x 30 items was used. Cronbach's alpha for the 30 items was 0. In both cases this places the overall scale reliability of the CSDS in the excellent range Nunnally and Bernstein, The reliabilities of the four sub-scales the unweighted sums of scores on the items comprising each sub-scale of the CSDS were also calculated.

For the Effectiveness sub-scale 6 items Cronbach's alpha was 0. For the Novelty sub-scale 11 items Cronbach's alpha was 0. For the Elegance sub-scale 7 items Cronbach's alpha was 0. For the Genesis sub-scale 6 items Cronbach's alpha was 0. Once again, in all cases these values fell in the excellent range Nunnally and Bernstein, The resulting structure satisfies typical criteria for a meaningful and interpretable simple structure, including a minimum of three items per factor. The majority of items in this structure have loadings rated as either "very good" or "excellent" Comrey and Lee,