Organizing Creativity: Creativity and Innovation under Constraints

Creativity and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study explored impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on creativity and productivity and how personality variables moderated these impacts. Two online self-report surveys were conducted. 863 (spring 2020) and 421 (spring 2021) participants were asked how the corona crisis affected their creativity and productivity. In addition, personality variables, namely the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), as well as interpersonal trust, need for cognition, risk-taking, and life satisfaction, were assessed. As a result of the crisis, the group of participants appeared more creative in 2020, while no significant group effect of the pandemic was found for productivity. In 2021, however, the crisis had a negative impact on creativity and productivity. In 2020, predictors for an improved creativity were openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and life satisfaction; predictors for improved productivity were conscientiousness, negative interpersonal trust, and life satisfaction. In 2021, only life satisfaction predicted improved creativity, while improved productivity was predicted by conscientiousness, negative neuroticism, and life satisfaction. At its beginning, the COVID-19 pandemic had, on average, a positive effect on creativity and a neutral one on productivity. Later, the impact turned negative on both creativity and productivity. Here, lower life satisfaction was particularly relevant.

The role of age and business coaching in the relationship of lean startup approach and innovative work behavior of women entrepreneurs during COVID-19

The purpose of the startup approach is to find an appropriate course of action that adds value to the economy’s development. This study is aimed to determine the effect of the lean startup approach with mediating effect of business coaching to foster innovative work behavior in women entrepreneurs. Additionally, the study also examines the moderating effect of age on the lean startup approach and innovative work behavior. A quantitative approach was employed. The findings show that the relationship between the lean startup approach and innovative work behavior is significant. Moreover, the findings also revealed a significant mediating effect of business coaching and moderating effect of age. This research encourages practitioners and scholars to deal with women entrepreneurship incubation initiatives in the lean startup methodology. Furthermore, this study also leads to a deeper understanding of women’s ideas for business exploration, growth, and implementation. The study contends that guidelines and directives are critical for creative entrepreneurial behavior.

Knowledge Management Processes and Service Innovation: Key Insights from Saudi International Airports

This study aims to examine the influence of knowledge management processes and organizational creativity on service innovation for international airports in Saudi Arabia. A questionnaire was used to collect data from a convenient sample of 315 respondents. The results extend the “spiral” knowledge assumption to include knowledge sharing and application processes. The study finds that knowledge creation has a significant positive impact on knowledge sharing, which in turn influences knowledge application. Moreover, knowledge management processes have a significant positive impact on organizational creativity, whereas organizational creativity does not have any impact on service innovation.

Being mobile: a call for collaborative innovation practices?

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine mobile technology as being a key apparatus and interface for collaborative innovation, which allows organisations to develop their information ecology.

Design/methodology/approach

The qualitative research was performed by in-depth interviews, observations and field notes. The eight main interviews are supported by an interdisciplinary narrative literature review of knowledge management and associated fields.

Findings

This study validates the following propositions: mobile technology can offer users timely information, mobile technology can foster collaboration beyond physical and organisational boundaries, in general, mobile technology enables a wider amount of interactions between people. Thereby, this paper draws some implications about the knowledge management of creative (and non-creative) workers.

Research limitations/implications

The collected data sheds light on how organisations and individuals positioned themselves about mobile technology co-creative practices before the COVID era. Therefore, it shall be pertinent to further investigate these findings through a quantitative approach to better ascertain path models and to strengthen the new results with another qualitative perspective, in the post-COVID era.

Practical implications

The study highlights how mobile devices are facilitating collaborative innovation practices by improving management decisions, enabling new business and/or operating models, developing a flow of ideas inner/outer an organisation and fostering the ability to make innovation.

Social implications

Mobile technology transforms the way to work (knowledge creation and/or conversion) and it changes the relations between collaborators in a working environment (beyond physical boundaries). This study deciphers how a creative and/or decision-making person can change their work schedule and/or routines based on the use of mobile devices.

Originality/value

The added value of this transdisciplinary study is that it improves research on collaborative innovation and collective knowledge by revealing three pertinent characteristics of mobile technology: enabling quick decision; connecting with a glocal network and fostering collective creativity. It also creates a bridge between the fields of education and business.

COVID-19: A Boon or a Bane for Creativity?

In many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a period of lockdown that impacted individuals' lifestyles, in both professional and personal spheres. New problems and challenges arose, as well as opportunities. Numerous studies have examined the negative effects of lockdown measures, but few have attempted to shine light on the potential positive effects that may come out of these measures. We focused on one particular positive outcome that might have emerged from lockdown: creativity. To this end, this paper compared self-reported professional creativity (Pro-C) and everyday creativity (little-c) before and during lockdown, using a questionnaire-based study conducted on a French sample (N = 1266). We expected participants to be more creative during than prior to lockdown, in both professional and everyday spheres. Regarding Pro-C, we did not see any significant differences between the two comparison points, before and during lockdown. Regarding everyday creativity, we observed a significant increase during lockdown. Furthermore, our results suggest that participants with a lower baseline creativity (before lockdown) benefited more from the situation than those with a higher initial baseline creativity. Our results provide new insights on the impact of lockdown and its positive outcomes. These measures may have inarguably negative consequences on the physical and mental health of many, but their positive impact exists as well.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS IN THE FRONT END OF INNOVATION: RESULTS FROM AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

This study empirically analyses the effects of five critical success factors on the front end of innovation and new product development success. Data from a self-developed questionnaire on a cross-industry sample of 77 German-based small- and medium-sized firms were collected through an online survey. Accouting for factors not included in previous studies, the results indicate that strategic alignment, creative encouragement, and external collaboration are the key predictors of front-end success. Surprisingly, the impact of process formalisation and the importance of cross-functional collaboration for front-end success could not be supported. We conject that collaboration in the front end of innovation must exceed simple communication and information exchange to significantly effect front-end success. Managerial implications of this study include the need for an internal search for ideas by fostering employees’ creative abilities while simultaneously remaining open to external input. Also, activities in the front end of innovation should be aligned with the organisation’s overall business strategy to promote successful ideation.

Innovative Behaviors, Employee Creativity, and Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Moderated Mediation

It is challenging for enterprises that lack innovation and creativity to survive successfully in the market. Employee top role performance is not always sufficient to gain a competitive advantage, in which innovative behaviors and creativity can be counted as necessary ingredients to build. This study proposed and tested employee innovative behaviors (IB) and creativity as mediator and moderator, respectively, of the impact of high-performance work practices (HPWPs) on sustainable competitive advantage (CA). The resource-based view and job demands resources model provided the theoretical underpinnings for the developed hypotheses that were tested using a sample of 323 customer-contact employees of 4- and 5-star hotels. The results indicated that HPWP indirectly predicted CA via IB. Also, creativity moderated the impact of HPWPs on innovative behaviors positively and on competitive advantage negatively. Employee innovative behaviors can generate substantial returns to service organizations competing with quasi-homogeneous end-products. The relevant theoretical and practical implications are further discussed. The scope of the study calls for caution in the generalizability of the overall findings. The research acknowledges the need to extend the findings by explicitly accounting for national cultural profiles. This study fills the dearth of research in service innovation in the hotel industry by testing the mediating effect of IB on the HPWPs CA nexus and reveals the moderating role that employee creative traits have in these relationships.

Artistic and Engineering Design of Platform-Based Production Systems: A Study of Swedish Architectural Practice

Research on platform-based production systems for house-building has focused on production and manufacturing issues. The aim of this research is to explore how the architectural design process contributes to the industrialised house-building industry from the perspective of creative design work. It also aims to describe how constraints affect architectural design work in the engineer-to-order context, when using platform-based production systems. Architects with experience in using platform-based building systems with different degrees of constraints were interviewed regarding creative aspects of the design work. The interviews, together with documents relating to platform constraints, were then analysed from the perspective of artistic and engineering design theories. The results show the benefits and issues of using platform constraints, both with prefabrication of volumetric modules, as well as prefabricated slab and wall elements. The study highlights a major research gap by describing how architectural work, from both the creative artistic and engineering design perspectives, is affected by constraints in the building platform: (1) the architectural design work goes through a series of divergent and convergent processes where the divergent processes are explorative and the convergent processes are solution-oriented; and (2), there is a trade-off between creativity and efficiency in the design work. Open parameters for layout design are key to architectural creativity, while predefinition supports efficiency. The results also provide an understanding of the potential for creativity in artistic and engineering work tasks through different phases in design, and how they are related to constraints in the platform. The main limitation of the research is the number of interviewed architects who had different background experiences of working with different types of platform constraints. More studies are needed to confirm the observations and to understand how creativity and efficiency interact with divergent and convergent design processes.

Dancing in chains: Creative practices in/of organizations

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, artists impose restrictions on themselves to encourage creativity and even have a way of “making things difficult” – imposing new constraints on themselves within which they have to dance. At least in the arts, it is difficulty rather than ease which promotes creativity in accordance with this view. This goes beyond the well-known idea of rules and other structures not only restricting but also enabling creativity; it also goes beyond insight into the creativity-enhancing effects of constraints, as recently emphasized in organization studies. Nietzsche adds three dimensions to this dialectic: time and the process of dancing inspired and encouraged by constraints; the opposition of old and new constraints; and the quality of intended, stimulating self-binding. We see this as an opportunity to explore the inspiring potential of Nietzsche’s piece about arts, “Dancing in chains”, when it comes to the different realm of creative practices and creativity in and of organizations. Such an exploration can obviously not aim to offer recipes of how to bring about valuable novelty, but simply intends to identify pertinent themes, issues and questions for organization studies – topics and aspects brought into a new or sharper light when looked at from Nietzsche’s perspective and that of some other philosophers, including Jon Elster’s analyses of constraints in general and of the complications of self-binding in order to promote creativity in particular. Also, we consider Míchel de Certeau’s “silent production” and Martha Feldman’s improvisational routines as being cases of “dancing in chains”.