Introduction to the Special Issue on Creativity in Innovation

Abstract

Introduction Managing 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-in-creasing complexity. These were the main findings of a recent face-to-face survey of 1500 CEOs, general man-agers, and senior public sector leaders around the globe (IBM, 2010). The effects of rising complexity – hybridiz-ing business issues with social, environmental, and eth-ical concerns – and the sudden convergence of digital, social, and mobile spheres, call for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with custom-ers in imaginative ways, and design their operations for speed, agility, and flexibility to position their organiza-tions 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 chal-lenge, 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 relation-ships with customers, and a greater focus on the medi-um-term future needs of customers. If social technologies, (big) data management, and analysis are going to play an important role in these transforma-tions, then management – structure, processes, culture, and leadership – still has an essential role to play in set-ting up the right context for innovation to thrive. The articles contributed to this special issue include many examples of actual drastic changes made by or-ganizations attempting to cope with creative chal-lenges. Managing creativity is a challenge for all the different functions of the enterprise and leads us to re-consider traditional ways of managing marketing, hu-man resources, logistics, accounting, and finance, as well as strategy and planning. As a result, creative or-Managing 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 or-ganizations. 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 intro-duction 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 a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees… but such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.