Introduction to the Special Issue on Creativity in Innovation

Abstract

IntroductionManaging creativity in order to accelerate and improve innovation is the key management challenge that will be faced by companies in the coming years, and this challenge will be faced in an environment of ever-increasing complexity. These were the main findings of a recent face-to-face survey of 1500 CEOs, general managers, and senior public sector leaders around the globe (IBM, 2010). The effects of rising complexity -hybridizing business issues with social, environmental, and ethical concerns -and the sudden convergence of digital, social, and mobile spheres, call for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways, and design their operations for speed, agility, and flexibility to position their organizations for sustainable success.Business leaders across 16 sectors recognize creativity and innovation as their major challenges, and yet, they admit that they are not fully prepared to meet this challenge, as discovered in a recent survey of business trends and challenges by Strategy& (Rothfeder, 2015). The surveyed leaders identified three paths to explore in preparation for the upcoming evolution of business and markets: operational flexibility, two-way relationships with customers, and a greater focus on the medium-term future needs of customers. If social technologies, (big) data management, and analysis are going to play an important role in these transformations, then management -structure, processes, culture, and leadership -still has an essential role to play in setting up the right context for innovation to thrive.The articles contributed to this special issue include many examples of actual drastic changes made by organizations attempting to cope with creative challenges. Managing creativity is a challenge for all the different functions of the enterprise and leads us to reconsider traditional ways of managing marketing, human resources, logistics, accounting, and finance, as well as strategy and planning. As a result, creative orManaging creativity for innovation is a key challenge in today's economy; therefore, the management of ideas will play in increasing role in driving the growth and resilience of organizations. Rather than simple inspired insights, ideas have to be addressed as complex socio-cognitive processes, to be organized and managed. To benefit from the full value of new ideas, management must constantly balance the formal and the informal, the logic of creation and the logic of production, and must learn to couple idea-generation processes and innovation processes through renewed knowledge management practices. In this introduction to the Technology Innovation Management Review's special issue on Creativity in Innovation, the guest editors highlight the need to manage: i) ideation processes to foster creativity, ii) the tension that exists between the logic of creation and production; and iii) disruptive innovation to transform a traditional industry. Today… corporations spend Introduction to the Special Issue on Creativity in ...

Collaborative Innovation Online: Entanglements of the Making of Content, Skills, and Community on a Songwriting Platform

“…Our findings indicate, for example, that FAWM is used for the collaborative production of song sketches that, in later stages, are promoted as polished songs on platforms such as Facebook or Soundcloud. Collaborative dynamics, then, not only unfold in the "division of labor" between online communities (for idea generation) and firms (for idea exploitation; e.g., Cohendet & Simon, 2015), but also in complex online ecologies (e.g., Boczkowski et al, 2018); it is these ecologies of innovation that deserve further academic attention.…”

“…Recent research has significantly expanded our knowledge of the various types of online communities and the modes of firm-community relations (Dahlander & Magnusson, 2005;Jeppesen & Frederiksen, 2006;O'Mahony & Bechky, 2008;Porter, 2004) as well as the processes of developing online communities (Kraut et al, 2012;Ren, Kraut, & Kiesler, 2007;Wiertz & de Ruyter, 2007). This research has highlighted that organizations face the challenge that the capitalization on knowledge produced by these nonfirm actors might, in fact, undermine their innovative potential by interfering with community dynamics (e.g., Cohendet & Simon, 2015;West & Lakhani, 2008).…”

A Practice Method for Studying Creative Communities

“…Aphoristically, innovation is a forest of invisible trees: we see the results of innovations around us, but creativities often stay hidden; we lionize the successful innovator, but do not see the community supporting and enabling our genius idol. Hence, to understand the origins of innovation, we need the ability to observe and understand the activities of creative communities and the ideation process (Cohendet & Simon, 2015), implying that we need to focus on creativity -not as an abstract concept, but on a very practical level: by studying the everyday activities and interactions of creative individuals and communities (e.g., Ellström, 2010;Stanley et al, 2016), in practice, as they unfold.…”

“…However, we cannot afford to oversimplify the creative process -increasingly, positive outcomes depend on a keen understanding of the origins of innovation. Indeed, innovation holds the key for solving most major problems facing companies (see Cohendet & Simon, 2015), the future generations (e.g., European Commission, 2013), national economies (e.g., UK Government Office for Science, 2017; Prime Minister's Office of Finland, 2015), even humanity as a whole (e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2005). Thus, one would assume that we would be well-equipped to study innovation, or -if not -that we would be focusing on developing that capability.…”

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“…Indeed, innovation holds the key for solving most major problems facing companies (see Cohendet & Simon, 2015), the future generations (e.g., European Commission, 2013), national economies (e.g., UK Government Office for Science, 2017; Prime Minister's Office of Finland, 2015), even humanity as a whole (e.g., Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2005). Thus, one would assume that we would be well-equipped to study innovation, or -if not -that we would be focusing on developing that capability.…”