CREATIVITY

While examples of creative individuals abound, creativity is significantly enhanced through interaction and collaboration between people, ideas and the environment. Creativity has also been termed as lateral thinking and represents a departure from a programmed or hierarchical thought process. It focuses on finding solutions rather than analyzing to find lacking elements. Creativity is a process that is adopted with innovation as the intended result. The more efficient the creative process, the more likely it is to result in an innovation.

Why creativity is important in an organizations? In analyzing collective creativity, methods and tools to facilitate creative thinking organization wide are critical. Creativity is difficult to manage (especially doing away with the notion that we can just have more by flipping a switch), but it can be fostered. Moreover, managers play quite different roles throughout the entire process, from fostering creativity to implementing innovations. Understanding those different roles across different stages will increase the probability of helping any organization take advantage of creative thinking and innovation.

The most basic definition of creativity is to bring something into being. It implies acting, taking, or doing. We like to think something is creative if it is novel and provides a solution to some existing problem. More recent developments in the study of creativity highlight a crucial component to consider creativity is a social activity. This perspective is becoming more and more recognized and is relevant to our aim of fostering organizational or group level creativity. Because creativity is the confluence of many people and many factors, creativity is most easily enhanced by changing the environment in which we operate and how we interact rather than hiring for creative talent. Creativity is a result of working with others (i.e., teamwork in organizations).

Taking these notions in sum, creativity is then defined as the synthesis of existing ideas in a unique way that is appropriate to the context, issue, or problem. This definition has some profound implications for fostering creativity in organizations.