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This volume brings together empirical and conceptual papers that investigate the challenges of organizing creativity in the innovation journey in and across different empirical contexts. Seen as the basis for innovating new products, processes or services, organizing creativity is studied as intentional efforts that occur in teams, organizations, and fields. What creativity is, how it is defined, negotiated and recognized is hereby co-constructed with different audiences and in different economic and societal spheres. The papers in this volume extend our understanding of these contextualized social dynamics of organizing creativity in four directions. The first direction sheds light on the temporal dynamics of organizing creativity in artistic fields. The second direction compares creative processes in arts and science, thereby examining tensions and uncertainties in the creative process unfolding in two distinctive contexts of creativity. The third direction examines identity struggles of creative agents in organizations with clashing roles, professional norms, and ambiguities in creativity assessment. The fourth and final direction unravels the communicative journey of ideas from pitching to feedback, revealing how ideas are challenged, enriched, and acquire meaning in communicative interaction. Overall, the papers in this volume contribute to a situated view of creative processes in innovation which goes beyond questions of idea generation to account for dynamics of idea development, judgment, and dissemination which involve identity struggles, evaluation, and communication – processes which are at the heart of organizing for innovation.

Organizational creativity and innovation are inherently complex phenomena, and subject to a myriad of broad contextual and social influences. As the evidence grows for the link between innovation and organizational effectiveness and, ultimately, organizational survival, there is no doubting the need for theoretical and practical advances in our understanding. The complex nature of these constructs, however, requires that such efforts utilize a multi-level lens. This chapter discusses key aspects of creativity and innovation in organizations, including fundamental construct definition issues, which underscore the need for a multi-level perspective. It also reviews extant theoretical perspectives for their contributions to a multi-level understanding, and the research in two key areas of social influence – group factors and leadership – that have received substantial attention in the organizational literature. The review and discussion of these areas reveal not only numerous advances, but also substantial limitations that must be resolved through more complex and comprehensive (i.e., multi-level) approaches. The chapter concludes with several recommendations intended to guide and inform future work in the organizational creativity and innovation field.

In some organizations action is taken to stimulate creativity and innovation. The right steps may have been taken, such as involving employees in decision making, recruiting and appointing employees who evidence characteristics of creativity, setting standards for work performance and giving regular feedback, yet creativity and innovation are hampered in some way. The culture of an organization may be a factor contributing to the extent to which creativity and innovation occur in an organization (Johnson, 1996; Judge et al., 1997; Pienaar, 1994; Shaughnessy, 1988; Tesluk et al., 1997; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1997 in Martins & Terblanche, 2003). The current organizational culture and the demands of creativity and innovation may lead to a conflict situation.

Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

Recognizing the impact of innovation on organizational performance, scholars from a number of disciplines have sought to identify the conditions that make innovation possible. Although these studies have served to identify a number of key variables, the relationship between these variables and innovation is complex. In this chapter, we argue that the apparent complexity of these relationships may be attributed to cross-level differences in the requirements for innovation and the existence of complex interactions among the phenomena operating at a given level of analysis. The implications of this multi-level perspective for understanding how innovation occurs in organizational settings are discussed.

Organizations may fail to innovate because receivers exhibit bias against adopting creative ideas. This paper explores many motivational, cognitive, and affective factors that can cause receivers to hinder the creativity–innovation process. In particular, receivers may engage in motivated reasoning and skepticism against creative ideas, face barriers to recognizing creative value, and experience negative affect when receiving creative ideas. Each creative adoption decision point during the creativity–innovation process is an opportunity for bias to derail progress. This helps explain why innovation can be so difficult. Understanding the biases that hinder the creativity–innovation process allows individuals and organizations to take action to mitigate them.

This chapter explores the unique role of leadership in organizational innovation. Drawing from the investment theory of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995), we show that organizational innovation begins with a leadership decision. Based on a review of the creativity, organizational, and leadership literatures, the key components of organizational innovation are examined from individual, group, and organization-wide perspectives. Leading innovation is conceptualized as a special case of leading organizational change, which requires creative leadership skills applied to social systems. Establishing an organizational environment that supports innovation in the current market environment increases systemic paradoxes that must be managed by leaders. We conclude that leading innovation increases the creative demand on the leadership system, which requires leaders who have a developed understanding of the process of innovation and its environmental requirements.

Agars, Kaufman, and Locke's (this volume) review of social influence within the creativity and innovation literature provides an introduction to multi-level issues within creativity research. Their chapter reveals that relevant social influences may differ by level, relevant domain characteristics may not hold across other domains, and creativity may be influenced differently than innovation. Building on Agars et al.'s work, this commentary offers several suggestions pertaining to multi-level research as a means of advancing creativity research, specifically as it relates to social influence. Suggestions for future research include consideration of levels-based boundaries within theoretical construct development, employment of a bracketing technique to review construct implications at levels above and below the construct of interest, and improvement in multi-level modeling of particular social influence and/or creative processes that are non-linear in nature.

This chapter attempts to elucidate the important role that divergent thinking plays in organizational creativity, innovation, and change. We define brainstorming as a systematized method of divergent thinking, review this literature, and advocate for the strategic use of brainstorming to enhance creativity and innovation. We identify contradictory findings in the research literature that have led practitioners and researchers to disregard brainstorming techniques. We suggest that cultural forces embedded in organizations may prevent divergent thinking and brainstorming from becoming established normative organizational processes, thus hampering organizations’ potential for change and innovation. The chapter closes by putting divergent thinking and brainstorming in perspective and provides guidelines for its use.

Conceptualizing creativity as an ascription made by external audiences, this paper sheds light on the organized making of creativity, a process we label creativization. Creativitization is based on specific forms of knowledge and communication. By means of empirical illustrations from the field of fashion, we first view the utilization of knowledge in the form of materializations (in technologies), repertoires (of routines), and pooling (in projects). Second, we shed light on the significance of communication and demonstrate that communication in the form of themes, narratives, and storytelling not only serves external purposes of staging, but also fulfills internal functions of developing novelties. Third, we consider the (often lose) couplings between knowledge utilization and communication in the making of creativity. Finally, because manifest and highly institutionalized creativity expectations absorb resources and attention, we view creativization as an innovation barrier or even a substitute for innovations rather than its base.