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Processes of novelty generation and adoption have received much more attention than novelty evaluation. This paper explores the internal processes enacted by organizations to recognize and assess novel ideas for further implementation by focusing on the role that artifacts play in identifying the creative potential of an idea versus another one. Our empirical study focuses on the evaluation of novelty in the form of new experiences and builds on the analysis of two highly creative organizations, elBulli restaurant, led by chef Ferran Adrià, and the Italian Drama Academy Nico Pepe. We find that organizations implement three distinct processes to evaluate the novelty of ideas: analyzing, structuring, and formalizing. In these processes, artifacts play a key role in making novel ideas tangible by anticipating audiences’ reactions, integrating the novelty generated into an organizational corpus of knowledge, and consolidating novel ideas for future applications. Our results show that these processes take place iteratively in all phases of the idea’s journey, increasingly leading to the collective identification and assessment of novelty.

This paper aims to identify the factors that influence the evaluation of an idea beyond its intrinsic values, especially those that relate to the presentation of the idea. With reference to a review of research conducted in the fields of psycho-sociology and psychology and using a qualitative comparative approach, the analysis of 57 pitches of entrepreneurial ideas during two start-up weekends shows that ideas receive the highest evaluation when they are judged to be the best in terms of novelty, feasibility, and relevance. However, our results also show that mastery by ideators of the basics of pitch presentation – especially clear enunciation – is also a necessary condition for acceptance of the idea by the audience. The paper seeks to contribute to the literature by identifying the most favorable configurations for a positive evaluation of an entrepreneurial idea in this type of innovation contest.

This chapter presents the personal perspectives of the author on issues related to methodology in teaching children with learning disabilities and to the role of methodology in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Additionally, problems schools have had in implementing IDEA are highlighted and proposals offered to alleviate those difficulties.

This chapter provides an in-depth understanding of the cognitive processes that facilitate creativity from a multi-level perspective. Because cognitive processes are viewed as residing within the individual and as an individual-level phenomenon, it is not surprising that a plethora of research has focused on various cognitive processes involved in creative production at the individual level and the factors that may facilitate or hinder the successful application of these processes. Of course, individuals do not exist in a vacuum, and many organizations are utilizing teams and groups to facilitate creative problem solving. We therefore extend our knowledge from the individual to the team level and group level, providing more than 50 propositions for testing and discussing their implications for future research.

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.

Scholars continue to debate whether planning, in fact, contributes to creativity and innovation. In this chapter, we argue that planning is critical to innovation and will contribute to the generation of viable new ideas. Effective planning, however, must be based on an incremental approach involving a viable portfolio of projects. The implications of this model for the management of innovation at the organizational, group, and individual levels are discussed. Potential new directions for research are considered, along with the model's implications for the management of creative ventures.

Studies of entrepreneurial action often distinguish between different phases such as opportunity identification, evaluation, and exploitation. Yet, the richness of past contributions masks the absence of an integral framework to organize, in a theoretically consistent ensemble, the different kinds of cognitive processes that underpin entrepreneurial action. In this chapter, we draw from research on human action and cognition to offer an integrative model of the cognitive processes that foster entrepreneurial action. By presenting a more specific articulation of when, how, and why different cognitive processes operate, we provide theorists and empiricists with a more complete picture of how entrepreneurs’ thinking evolves from the emergence of an opportunity idea to the initiation of concrete entrepreneurial acts. In addition, our framework draws attention to cognitive inflection points that entrepreneurs must navigate in their journey toward entrepreneurship. By explicitly locating these inflection points and specifying the changes in mental processing that occurs at each point, we highlight that for entrepreneurial action to ensue, entrepreneurs must shift from one type of cognitive processing to another. Along this line, our model draws attention to the entire set of cognitive “skills” entrepreneurs must master for successful completion of each phase and successful transitions between phases.

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.

Much of the idea exchange and evaluation that are part of the creative process occur in groups. It is often presumed that groups facilitate these processes, but much research indicates that groups often hinder effective exchange of ideas and that they may not facilitate their evaluation. We summarize the factors that limit the potential of groups in these domains and use the cognitive–social–motivational model (Paulus & Brown, 2003, 2007) to highlight the conditions under which group creativity is enhanced. In particular, we focus on the conditions under which groups can actually outperform similar size sets of individuals and thus provide evidence for synergy in creative groups.

Intuition, along with empirical research, suggests that the generation of creative ideas benefits from divergent thinking among team members. However, the generation of creative ideas represents only one stage of the innovative process; teams also must implement ideas. In this chapter, we propose that effective idea implementation may depend on the opposite of team divergence: team conformity. Specifically, we propose that conformity facilitates various group processes important for effective idea implementation, including team coordination, information exchange, conflict management, and collective efficacy. Next, we discuss the role of leaders in managing the magnitude and processes of conformity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications and important next steps for studying conformity in relation to team innovative effectiveness.