Creativity is a component that enhances the ability of organizations to retain their competitive advantage as well as to stay ahead of their competitors. For creative organizations, the ideas and insights of their employees are of crucial importance. Most of the creativity research concentrates only on individual aspects of creativity. This paper also stresses the collective aspect of creativity in the organization. It studies how employees experience creativity and in what way they would support creative processes in their organization. The research material is from an action-based research project that tries to reveal innovation potential in all levels of the organization. According to the results, there is room for creativity in every job. However, creativity and especially the collective aspect of creativity in the organization are undervalued, though most of the work in the organization needs the expertise and creativity of many employees. This study also introduces the employee-driven way to support collective creativity in the organization.

The centres of collective creativity tend to be at the intersections of different domains. Based on this, distances between innovating partners can be considered as sources of innovation. However, the literature usually emphasises the advantages of proximity. Proximity may, however, also have negative impacts due to the problem of lock-in -meaning a lack of openness and flexibility. This article takes the changed pattern of innovation as a point of departure: innovations are seen to emerge in nonlinear processes, often combining very diverse knowledge bases. Structural holes in networks of innovation systems are especially fruitful for innovation. In theoretical discussion, this article presents seven dimensions of distance: cognitive, communicative, organisational, functional, cultural, social, and geographical. In attempts to create innovation, different kinds of distances would need to be exploited knowingly. The study uses the experiences of the case study to answer how it is possible to span the structural holes in cross-disciplined multi-actor innovation. According to the experiences, the brokerage function is essential in exploiting the different kinds of distances. Indeed, it was necessary to define two brokerage functions: process brokerage and session brokerage.

Before launching a development project to enhance innovation capability, it is essential to know how innovation capability is comprehended. This paper suggests a procedure to locate the development targets of organizational innovation capability before making decisions on projects. First, from the viewpoint of practice-based innovation, an understanding of the concept of innovation capability is provided. Further, the suggested classification for innovation capability provides a basis for developing the measurement instrument. Finally, to answer the research question of how an innovation intervention should be targeted, this paper uses practical experiences of implementing the procedure in the setting of a single case company.

Purpose -Studies with a user approach in a public service context are still rare, making the contribution of this study worthwhile. This paper aims to present a case of facilitating innovativeness by involving stakeholder groups in the development of service production in the public sector. The case is related to the provision of housing and well-being services to ageing people. The study proposes focusing on the front-end stage of an innovation process: the ideation phase in a virtual idea generation environment, in which fruitful and fresh ideas that are based on customers' needs are sought for in order to support the innovation process. Design/methodology/approach -A constructive research approach is applied in this study. Central theoretical building blocks are provided by the extended SECI model as presented by Uotila, Melkas and Harmaakorpi, Amabile's componential theory of creativity and Burt's and Granovetter's arguments regarding structural holes and weak ties. Findings -Based on the evaluation, it can be argued that the open innovation model and particularly the inclusion of external information and knowledge from potential service users generated, despite some shortcomings, new insights and added to the value of the development process. Originality/value -The paper proposes a model that can be utilized in facilitating the novelty value of presented ideas in the front end of the innovation process and also critically discusses the challenges of the applied model, especially from the point of view of the brokering function needed during the process.

One of the contemporary demands in organizations is the need to create new knowledge and innovations. The purpose of this study is to clarify how creativity for the fuzzy front-end innovation processes can be supported by transformational leadership. In addition, the study aims at recognizing (a) challenges that organizations confront at the beginning of innovation processes and (b) what characters of transformational leadership are emphasized as well as how leaders should react during these challenging processes. The qualitative data used in this study is a partial case study from a wider action research-based development project, which aims at revealing the hidden innovation potential at different levels of an organization. Creativity and innovation are essential parts of development processes. This study contributes to the current literature on search strategies in relation to transformational leadership (TL) by extending the understanding of how to support employees' creativity and involve employees in discovering new innovation opportunities. In addition, this study suggests that TL's characteristics can be shared positively in practice as well as be performed simultaneously in the same organization development process by different leaders.