Organizing Creativity: Creativity and Innovation under Constraints

The best way of organizing creativity within organizations remains somewhat enigmatic to scholars, particularly when it comes to the role of constraints. On the one hand, creative organizations are often associated with freedom, autonomy, weak rules and few boundaries. On the other hand, several studies suggest that constraints, particularly design constraints, often stimulate creativity rather than suppress it. All in all, findings are mixed and inconclusive, and further research that explores this area of tension is required. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we introduce the topic of constraints and creativity, and raise some of the open questions in this field. By way of illustration, we report on a preliminary study about the role of constraints. Secondly, we set the stage for the contributions in this special issue on creativity and innovation under constraints, by identifying four central themes for further research. We subsequently outline the articles in this issue, and show how each of them contributes to one or more of these themes.     

Triggering Creativity in Science and Engineering: Reflection as a Catalyst

In the recent literature, creativity has been clarified as a phenomenon that categorically differs from intelligence in that the ideas that result from it may not be deduced by applying current reasoning techniques on the state-of-the-art knowledge. Thus, creativity clearly transcends intelligence. Despite this new perspective, by its very nature, creativity defies a true and complete definition and the issue of how to arrive at a creative solution for a given problem, continues to remain an open question. This paper represents an effort to gain insights into the nature of creativity. It begins by observing (i) documented manifestations of creative discoveries and inventions by leading scientists and inventors, (ii) records of creative flashes in many day-to-day ordinary activities, and (iii) instances of creativity in Nature. It then critically analyzes these observations to uncover what mechanisms trigger the processes that eventually lead to creative solutions to problems. This paper submits three hypotheses for cases (i) through (iii) and claims that reflection constitutes the underlying mechanism in each of them, serving as a catalyst for creativity. The first hypothesis is that, in many of the highly creative scientific and engineering discoveries, reflection has played an explicit role in catalyzing the onset of creativity in the scientists and inventors, leading to spontaneous solutions. The second hypothesis is that creativity may be triggered by resorting to implicit reflection. The underlying mechanism consists of highly experienced professionals who report arriving at decisions and diagnoses, almost instantaneously, through intuitive flashes that later turn out to be precisely correct. The third postulate is that Nature is guided by reflection, while utilizing enormous resources and knowledge at her disposal, to play her meta-level role in introducing creative traits, selectively, in one or more individuals of a specific animal colony. The resulting collective behavior of the entire colony represents a spontaneous, creative behavior, very different from that of a pure, homogeneous colony. In essence, the contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, although the exact definition of creativity continues to elude us, the use of explicit and implicit reflection constitutes two approaches that are potentially useful in triggering creativity, at will, in ordinary scientific and engineering personnel to achieve quantum leaps in our knowledge and achievement. The role of reflection is that of a catalyst. Reflection also appears to underlie the inner workings of Nature. Second, from the perspective of engineering pedagogy, these approaches may constitute a tried and tested mechanism for inducing creativity in ordinary students through practice.     

Creative Potential and Practised Creativity: Identifying Untapped Creativity in Organizations

This study examines the construct validity of creative potential and practised creativity, two overlooked aspects of creativity that may be useful for identifying untapped creative resources in organizations. Results of an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing structural equation modelling techniques provide some initial evidence in support of the construct validity of these concepts. These findings appear to have important managerial implications for increasing creativity and overall organizational effectiveness. The results presented here also suggest some directions for future research aimed at examining the relationships between creative potential, practised creativity and other variables of interest.     

Creativity and Its Discontents: Professional Ideology and Creativity in Architect Work

Architects are a professional group that is commonly associated with creative and aesthetic work and with strong professional norms, values and identities. While such shared norms and beliefs are positive overall in terms of being constitutive of professional subject‐positions, an overemphasis on specific skills and qualities may also be regarded as a burden on members of the professional community. A study of a major Scandinavian architect office suggests that the perceived lack of creative and innovative thinking and accompanying dialogues and discussions among practising architects tends to produce cynicism and, to some extent, disappointment. As a consequence, professional ideologies may in some cases be out of joint with everyday work realities, and thereby to some extent produce expectations that are complicated to fulfil. Professional ideologies are thus both what integrates and consolidates a profession while at the same time prescribing ideal future scenarios for the professional community.     

Factors Influencing Creativity in Virtual Design Teams: An Interplay between Technology,Teams and Individuals

Creativity is a topic of interest across numerous disciplines and areas of study. Creativity constitutes a challenging aspect of engineering design, and scholars in the field of management claim that the increase in virtual teamwork calls for research as to how virtual configurations alter some of the management practices based on the collocated workplace. By reviewing the different literatures, we posit a knowledge gap regarding creativity in the virtual design context, where varying degrees of virtuality are likely to exert an influence on creativity. In our quest to start bridging this gap, we pursued an exploratory case study with a student‐based virtual design team project, known as the European Global Product Realization (EGPR). Thirty‐nine interview extracts, covering most participants, along with non‐participant observation and document review, gave us insights into the nature of the project, the participants' perceptions of creativity, and their experience of designing in virtual teams. In all, our study unearths and discusses a number of factors – and the extent to which – they are found to influence creativity in virtual design teams. The study has cross‐domain relevance from those interested in the management of virtual teams through to those looking at creativity and design.     

Users as a Hidden Resource for Creativity: Findings from an Experimental Study on User Involvement

The main objective of this article is to report the empirical findings from a study on user involvement in service innovation. In doing this, we seek to answer the question of how user involvement affects the originality of new service ideas. An experimental investigation was carried out which included 54 participants arranged into three groups of creative users, ordinary users and professional service developers. The empirical data revealed that the users produced more original ideas than the company’s professional service developers. It is thus suggested that business organizations attempt to innovate original products would benefit from involving their customers.     

Emotions and temperament of robots: Behavioral aspects

An approach to the control of robots behavior based on the emotion and temperament mechanism is proposed. It is shown that these psychological features can be simulated fairly simply. The proposed emotion-based architecture of the robot control system leans upon the Simonov informational theory of emotions, while the specific features of temperament are reduced to a two-parameter model of the excitation-inhibition type. Experiments performed with mobile robots are described. These experiments demonstrate a set of various types of robots’ behavior: melancholic, choleric, sanguine, and phlegmatic. All these types were implemented using the so-called temperament controller, which determines a balance between the excitation and inhibition parameters of the robot control system. An FSM-based model of temperament is also proposed that makes it possible to describe the behavior of an individual. Using this model, it is shown that, for performing certain collective behavior tasks, it is useful to have in the group individuals with different behavior so that this behavior also depends on the individual emotions and temperament of robots.     

Creativity for Engineering Plant Design: An Exploratory Study

A pilot study of creativity enhancement techniques took place within a large engineering firm in the UK. Exploratory interviews were carried out with professionals in the areas of creativity, mechanical design engineering and management in order to identify informally acquired skills of successful design practice.¹ Engineers participated in an introductory one day training programme applying creative techniques to real design problems from the heavy industrial engineering field. Initial feedback on the programme was recorded in addition to impact studies which took place after a ten-week interval. The impact of the programme was reported during the course of interviews which were complemented with the completion of detailed questionnaires. Results suggest that traditional training programmes for such professionals may need to be modified to become more user-friendly.     

Creativity and evolution: a metadesign perspective

Abstract

In a world that is not predictable, improvisation and evolution are more than a luxury: they are a necessity. The challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of making it an opportunity for more creative and more sustainable solutions. User-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time. These approaches have not given enough emphasis and they have provided few mechanisms to support systems as living entities that can evolve over time. Metadesign is a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place. This approach extends the traditional notion of design beyond the original development of a system to include co-adaptive processes between users and systems that enable the users to act as designers in personally meaningful activities and be creative.     

Computer Produced Mind-Maps,Rich Pictures and Charts as Aids to Creativity

Good communication and shared understanding between executive teams are extremely important. Teams have to find ways to present increasing amounts of information to one another effectively. Techniques which help people to make better use of information, help discussion and debate, and aid clarity of communication are invaluable. Computer assisted creativity tools employing graphical representations have much to offer individuals and groups working on problems or trying to structure their thinking. They provide a stimulus which is absent when using conventional thinking. The paper provides a review of a selection of these creativity enhancing tools.     

Facilitating representation and retrieval of structured cases: Principles and toolkit

Case-Based reasoning (CBR) applications are increasingly used for problems involving structured data, especially in process-oriented domains. Available CBR frameworks rely primarily on flat case representations, leaving developers of process-oriented CBR systems without general-purpose tools aimed at their needs. This paper discusses needs to support structure-based retrieval for CBR and how they have been addressed in the development of the Structure Access Interface (SAI), a toolkit for representation and retrieval of structured cases which is now available for general use. Integrating SAI into a CBR project eliminates the need for developing a storage scheme for graph data structures and facilitates the development of retrieval algorithms by (1) providing useful code for common retrieval tasks and (2) delineating the tasks which may require domain-specific implementations. SAI maintains flexibility through its customizability yet carries solutions for many common tasks for CBR developers, as well as illuminating some general principles for addressing common representation and retrieval needs for process-oriented CBR tasks and the relationship between CBR needs for structured retrieval and needs and methods in graph oriented database research. The paper closes with an evaluation of SAI's scalability and demonstration of the value of enabling developers to select retrieval methods suited to their tasks. It closes with a discussion of SAI's relationship to the growing body of work on graph databases.     

The Climate for Creativity and Change in Teams

This article reports the results of a study conducted to examine the ability of the Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ^TM) to effectively discern climates that either encourage or discourage creativity and the ability to initiate change in a team setting. The purpose of the study is to examine the concurrent criterion–related validity of the SOQ. The article explores the characteristics in an organisational climate that promote teamwork and some of the tripwires one needs to be aware of in the formation and management of teams. Nine dimensions of the climate for creativity and change as measured by the Situational Outlook Questionnaire are put forward and defined in relation to teams. The methodology and results of the study are reported. The results show that when subjects (N7equals;154) complete the SOQ based on their recollection of a best– and worst–case team experience, the measure is able to consistently and significantly discriminate between the two types of experiences. Conclusions, implications, and areas for future research to further examine the validity of the SOQ are explored.     

Organizing Individual and Collective Creativity: Flying in the Face of Creativity Clichés

The growing complexity of problems requires collective solutions to produce creative outcomes. Organizational theory on creativity has been extensively developed in recent decades, but two problematic issues remain. First, no current comprehensive model explains the development of collective creativity. Second, no empirical research has been conducted on the process of theory dissemination and its relevance within the managerial community. This paper provides evidence which can inform the design of collective creative projects within organizations, flying in the face of some managerial clichés. We design a research project which enables managerial sensemaking to emerge and which proposes a comprehensive approach to the design of team creativity. From a research design involving 24 managers and 98 eleven‐person groups, results confirm that creativity is not only about creative genius, and design for creativity is not a matter of linear correlation but implies a more sophisticated and integrative approach according to which individual creative skills, team dynamics and organizational solutions interact with each other to produce a collective creative performance.