Dialogue‐Based Evaluation as a Creative Climate Indicator: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

This paper examines how different forms of performance evaluation relate to aspects of the creative climate in a major pharmaceutical company. The study was based on a large employee‐attitude survey that was distributed to all company employees. The study analyses survey results from 5,333 employees at five R&D sites. The results indicate that management's evaluation of employees (either dialogue‐based or control‐based) relates to the type of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) that drives employees, to their style of thinking (value‐focused thinking) and on their attitudes to organizational creativity. The paper then discusses implications of these findings for HRM.     

Evolving improvised ideation from humour constructs: A new method for collaborative divergence

This paper reviews and applies key principles from improvised comedy (“improv”) to overcome common barriers in effective group ideation, resulting in the formulation and presentation of a new creative idea generation method. The emergence of an innovative product design can be compared to the telling of a funny joke: both combine seemingly unconnected ideas in a way that is both surprising and satisfying. Our research expands upon this link between humour and creativity, and operationalizes the improv principles best suited to the conceptual design process. A workshop‐based methodology was used to select, develop, and refine the method protocol and facilitation technique. Participant feedback and observations have demonstrated how this approach can expand the solution space to support the generation of bold, innovative ideas. Finally, we present a step‐by‐step guide for the new “design improv” method and discuss its potential value in the generation of creative ideas in a group ideation context.     

Thematic Ideation – Antecedents and Consequences of Individuals’ Thematic Similarity Recognition

Work on thematic thinking, an individual's preference for basing decisions and cognitive processes on thematic similarity, has been developed recently. These preferences also build the basis for idea generation (thematic ideation) and evaluation processes. Research results indicate that there are inter‐individual differences in these preferences. We apply these findings from the field of cognition to the business context and theoretically develop and empirically test a set of antecedents and consequences of thematic thinking. Results indicate that experience and positive affect are positively related to thematic thinking. The consequences that were examined, adaptation and creativity, showed relations which were reverse to the ones hypothesized based on related prior literature. Counter‐intuitively, adaptation is positively related to thematic thinking, while creativity is negatively related. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications and highlight avenues for future research on thematic thinking.     

How good are ideas identified by an automatic idea detection system?

Online communities can be an attractive source of ideas for product and process innovations. However, innovative user‐contributed ideas may be few. From a perspective of harnessing “big data” for inbound open innovation, the detection of good ideas in online communities is a problem of detecting rare events. Recent advances in text analytics and machine learning have made it possible to screen vast amounts of online information and automatically detect user‐contributed ideas. However, it is still uncertain whether the ideas identified by such systems will also be regarded as sufficiently novel, feasible and valuable by firms who might decide to develop them further. A validation study is reported in which 200 posts from an online home brewing community were extracted by an automatic idea detection system. Two professionals from a brewing company evaluated the posts in terms of idea content, idea novelty, idea feasibility and idea value. The results suggest that the automatic idea detection system is sufficiently valid to be deployed for the harvesting and initial screening of ideas, and that the profile of the identified ideas (in terms of novelty, feasibility and value) follows the same pattern identified in studies of user ideation in general.     

现代招贴的创造性思维

现代设计艺术的发展,愈来愈要求设计师具有强烈的创新意识,创造性思维。但在这个到处充斥着创意术语而又缺乏创意的环境下,如何创造创意?也许我们应该改变的是我们的思维,只有具有创造性思维才能做出独创性的作品来。     

Crowdsourced idea generation: The effect of exposure to an original idea

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly important approach to pursuing innovation. In crowdsourcing ideation websites, crowd members are often exposed to some stimulus ideas, such as examples provided by companies or peers' ideas. Understanding the effect of being exposed to original stimulus ideas in this context may inform the design of the crowdsourcing process. To test this effect, an experiment was conducted where crowd workers were asked to design a public service advertisement. Depending on the experimental condition, the participants were exposed to an original idea, or a common idea, or no idea. As compared to the absence of exposure, exposure to an original idea decreased fluency, defined as the number of ideas generated by each person, and increased the average originality of ideas generated by each person. By contrast, exposure to a common idea had no effect on either idea originality or fluency. The semantic similarity between the stimulus idea and the first idea generated was higher when the stimulus was common versus original as measured by latent semantic analysis. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.     

Beyond the Generation of Ideas: Virtual Idea Campaigns to Spur Creativity and Innovation

Firms striving to maintain high rates of innovation need a continuous flow of new ideas. This is resulting in the establishment by large firms of IT platforms to generate ideas for innovation, and to encourage employees and customers to participate in innovation contests. However, there has been little published research on the use of IT platforms for idea generation by employees, and it is unclear whether they facilitate in‐house innovation. The purpose is to investigate how firms use IT platforms internally to generate ideas, and how their use contributes to the innovation process in large firms. We rely on data from two collaborative research projects in the automotive industry: Volvo Cars and Renault. We found that both firms used IT platforms as campaigns to promote innovation and to involve employees in the innovation process. The findings suggest that these virtual idea campaigns support innovation in large firms mainly by (1) encouraging employee creativity in idea generation and (2) involving employees and top managers simultaneously in the innovation process. This paper contributes to idea management systems theory by highlighting the importance of virtual idea campaigns for the firm's innovation process, and their dual role.     

Ideation Capabilities for Continuous Innovation

This paper explores ideation capabilities in large organizations. Based on the dynamic capabilities framework, it is seen that ideation capabilities are managerial and organizational processes for the stimulation, identification, selection and implementation of ideas. In order to explore how these capabilities are manifested and used in firms, case studies of four Swedish companies have been performed. The results of the study show that there are different approaches to ideation. In terms of the nature of innovative ideas, the observations lead to the suggestion that ideation presents some seemingly paradoxical issues to management. Firms with an explicit focus on building ideation practices experience that there are some negative consequences of the resultant formalization. Furthermore, the extent to which many employees should be involved in ideation is a difficult aspect, even though new technologies make this more viable. Also the degree to which the search for ideas should be directed is a non‐trivial question, as the ideation processes can be facilitated by both freedom and limitations. It is nevertheless seen that firms can benefit from more deliberate approaches to ideation, in particular if these are broad and balanced and focus on both building capabilities that formalize the informal, in terms of establishing explicit processes, roles and systems, and building capabilities needed to manage informal structures in new ways.     

Methodology for competitive strategy development

Fighting terrorists involves taking action against a highly adaptive and cunning adversary. In this competitive situation, however, those involved may have dissimilar objectives. Given this difference of purpose, selecting an optimal strategy to achieve one's objectives can be a complex task. Techniques from decision theory, and specifically value focused thinking (VFT), are proven approaches for developing creative strategies to yield better decisions. However, these methods are focused on one decision maker choosing an optimal decision without reference to the affect the decision has on other decision makers and without reference to the affect the decisions of others have on them. On-the-other-hand, techniques especially suited for analyzing competitive situations, such as game theory, assume strategies exist without guidance on how to develop the strategies. This paper presents a methodology to bridge this gap by providing a means to develop strategies in competitive situations where the objectives of those involved are not necessarily the same.     

Lessons from Ideation: Where Does User Involvement Lead Us?

Firms are increasingly involving users in new product development (NPD). Their product users frequently provide solution information, such as new product ideas. However, these users are often considered a homogeneous group of ordinary users; their individual abilities and the specific input they provide for NPD are not yet well understood. The goal of this paper is to determine whether different types of users are differently predisposed to produce ideas. We derive hypotheses regarding the possible outcome of involving different user types in idea generation tasks from the current literature on customer integration into NPD. In a quasi‐experimental setting, we test our assumptions on 93 users, who generate ideas in a smart home context. The results indicate that users’ contribution depends on their specific domain knowledge, which is broadly understood as knowledge of a specific area that influences ideation towards solutions in this domain. We distinguish between four types of users: those with high trend awareness, high technical skills, high technical innovativeness, and high ethical reflectiveness. We find that users with high technical skills are more likely to produce ideas that are technically feasible. Trend‐aware and technically innovative users produce ideas of greater originality. Ethically reflective users tend to come up with ideas that will have a positive impact on society.     

Emotions as Constraining and Facilitating Factors for Creativity: Companionate Love and Anger

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.     

Using an Analytic Hierarchy Process in Advertising Creativity

The potential contribution of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for enhancing the creative brief within advertising is discussed. AHP software used as a group decision support system (GDSS) can facilitate the creative process by encouraging the generation of ideas. The structuring stage facilitates the sorting of those ideas in to a coherent decision model that represents all alternatives, providing focus and relevance. Structuring and the evaluation stage encourage the blending of rational and intuitive thought. Finally, additional facilities allow the advertiser to reflect and revise their decisions. Overall, it would appear the technique has much potential for managing creativity.     

The perceived importance and the presence of creative potential in the health professional's work environment

The value of creative employees to an organisation's growth and innovative development, productivity, quality and sustainability is well established. This study examined the perceived relationship between creativity and work environment factors of 361 practicing health professionals, and whether these factors were present (realised) in their work environment. Job design (challenges, team work, task rotation, autonomy) and leadership (coaching supervisor, time for thinking, creative goals, recognition and incentives for creative ideas and results) were perceived as the most important factors for stimulating creativity. There was room for improvement of these in the work environment. Many aspects of the physical work environment were less important. Public health sector employers and organisations should adopt sustainable strategies which target the important work environment factors to support employee creativity and so enhance service quality, productivity, performance and growth. Implications of the results for ergonomists and workplace managers are discussed with a participatory ergonomics approach recommended.

Practitioner summary: Creative employees are important to an organisation's innovation, productivity and sustainability. The survey identified health professionals perceive a need to improve job design and leadership factors at work to enhance and support employee creativity. There are implications for organisations and ergonomists to investigate the creative potential of work environments.     

‘Resisting Creativity,Creating the New’. A Deleuzian Perspective on Creativity

Create/Innovate or die. This is the taken‐for‐granted ‘truth’ in the social, political and economic context in which we currently live. In fact, so accepted is this mantra that criticism seems foolish; mere evidence of the entrenched conservatism that needs to be challenged. This article posits an alternative view of creativity, drawing in particular on the thinking of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The writing of Deleuze is used to explore our understanding of creativity, in terms of what ‘creativity’ is (and what it is not), and the destructive (and sometimes pointless) nature of creativity. In doing so it is hoped that this article challenges clichéd representations of ‘creativity’, the typical ‘creativity is wonderful and we need a lot more of it . . .’ type arguments and assist scholars to become more creative (or at least more reflective) in their own practice.     

Embedded (Lead) Users as Catalysts to Product Diffusion

Firms can harness social user networks not only for ideation, but also to accelerate and facilitate diffusion of new product introductions. They select individuals whose own product adoptions and opinions influence adoption decisions of others. In this paper we transfer this rationale to firm employees. We focus on ‘embedded users’ who are employees of a firm, but at the same time users of the firm's products. We aim to find out if their access to user networks, use experience and lead userness impact their opinion leadership and domain‐specific innovativeness. We also show how cognitive empathy towards external users is a mechanism to explain these relationships. Drawing on the user innovation and consumer behaviour literature, we derive and test eight hypotheses on a sample of 54 firm employees in gaming hardware firms. We find that lead userness is positively related to domain‐specific innovativeness and opinion leadership, but use experience only to the former. Cognitive empathy mediates all relationships in our study. To facilitate embedded users' tendency to act as opinion leaders and to adopt new products, managers should encourage their employees to use the firm's products to build use experience and thus develop cognitive empathy towards external users.     

Employee creativity in war zones: Empirical evidence from small firms in Afghanistan

The major concern of employees during times of war and conflict is apparently physical survival. But how are top managers of small‐sized companies enhancing the generation of novel and useful ideas by their employees in such physically dangerous business environments? In Afghanistan, as a war‐torn country, this research examined for the first time how getting closer to employees—which is conceptualized as internal marketing orientation culture in our study—directly affects the generation of novel and useful ideas by employees in the workplace. Our analysis is based on survey data from 81 newly established small‐sized companies in Afghanistan. Results indicate a mediating role of employees' perceived psychological safety on the relationship between internal market orientation culture and employees' creative work involvement. Moreover, we discuss the impact of employees' creative work involvement on small‐sized firm competitiveness improvement in general. Finally, we extend our implications in the context of the componential theory model of creativity, which might also serve as a framework for future research.     

A Review of Employee Well‐Being and Innovativeness: An Opportunity for a Mutual Benefit

By drawing on the Job Demands and Resources Model, this review article develops a conceptual framework to advance theoretical understanding of the relationship between job‐related demands and resources, employee well‐being and innovativeness. In conditions characterized by too high levels of demands, employees may suffer from burnout. When job resources are high, they are likely to feel engaged with their work. Burnout in turn can be seen as an inhibitor of innovativeness, and work engagement as an antecedent to innovativeness, mediating the effects of resources and demands at work on innovativeness. We further argue that innovativeness can function as a resource or a demand, depending on how it is managed. In addition to understanding the dual role of innovativeness, the identification of job‐specific demands and resources is central to supporting employee well‐being and, subsequently, innovativeness. The implications of the proposed conceptual framework for academic researchers and managers are discussed.     

Creativity in non‐routine jobs: The role of transformational leadership and organizational identification

An increasing number of individuals work in jobs with little standardization and repetition, that is, with high levels of job non‐routinization. At the same time, demands for creativity are high, which raises the question of how employees can use job non‐routinization to develop creativity. Acknowledging the importance of social processes for creativity, we propose that transformational leaders raise feelings of organizational identification in followers and that this form of identification then helps individuals to develop creativity in jobs with little routinization. This is because organizational members evaluate and promote those ideas as more creative, which are in line with a shared understanding of creativity within the organization. To investigate these relationships, we calculated a mediated moderation model with 173 leader–follower dyads from China. Results confirm our hypotheses that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between job non‐routinization on employee creativity through organizational identification. We conclude that raising feelings of social identity is a key task for leaders today, especially when working in uncertain and fast developing environments with little repetition and the constant need to develop creative ideas.     

How do Individual‐Level Factors Affect the Creative Solution Formation Process of Teams?

The generation of creative solutions involves nonlinear dynamic procedures that can only be achieved through the creativity of individual team members. Thus, it is important to understand how the formation of individual‐level creativity factors influence the creative solution formation process. The creative solution formation process can be divided into four phases: idea generation, idea screening, idea development and solution verification. Prior research suggests that the creative process may be affected by motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), knowledge stock (explicit and tacit), individual creativity (intelligence and divergent thinking), and pressure (challenge and time). We tested the effects of these eight factors on performance in the idea generation and idea development phases by conducting an experiment. Our results indicate that intrinsic motivation, intelligence and divergent thinking have a significant positive effect on both idea generation and idea development. Tacit knowledge and challenge pressure have a significant positive effect on idea generation. Time pressure has a significant negative effect on idea development. We also show that both idea generation and idea development have a significant impact on the quality of the final creative solution.     

Leader‐Member Exchange (LMX) and innovation: A test of competing hypotheses

In this paper, we address the relation between Leader‐Member Exchange (LMX; the quality of the relationship between leader and subordinate), employee creativity (the generation of novel and useful ideas), and employee innovation (the promotion and implementation of these ideas). In the current set of studies, we test the competing hypotheses that LMX will either have a direct effect on employee innovation, or an indirect effect through employee creativity. In a field study of leader–subordinate dyads (N = 118), we found that LMX had no direct effect on employee innovation, and that employee creativity fully mediated the relationship between LMX and innovation. In a follow‐up two‐wave field study of employees (N = 398), we found that the LMX dimension professional respect predicted innovation through creativity, while the other dimensions did not. The results of this work indicate that research on LMX and innovation requires a multidimensional perspective, and that it may be valuable to differentiate between creativity and innovation.