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In a latest article, Dr. Yoram Solomon underlines the relationship between creativity, an individual function, and innovation, an organisational function. In order to transform an original idea to a new and useful product or service, an organisation should make a successful application of its resources. In other words, the link between an idea and company output is implementation.
This function requires a full support from the organisation which, according to Dr. Solomon, can be identified in three levels: i) organisational climate, ii) team dynamics and iii) individual efforts. All these three play an important role and none of them can be missed or ignored. More specifically:
Ignoring the Organisational Climate would hamper creative idea generation when employees don’ t feel empowered to do so. Employees will be afraid to try new things, fearing for the consequences of failure. Those who never try will never fail. But they will never succeed, either. Employees will have to “fight’ management to get things done, as management will not allocate resources to new initiatives. Implementation will suffer, and so will creativity.
Ignoring team dynamics will support only individual ideas. Only ideas that were fully conceived within one person’ s brain will be presented to management. The company will not benefit from the diverse experience and knowledge of its employees, as poor team dynamics will prevent effective team brainstorming, and will never reach 1+1=3. Internal competition and strife will prevail and creativity will get a lower priority.
Ignoring individual creativity will be characterised by a low quality and quantity of ideas. A lot of effort will be placed on innovation. The company will likely give employees time and space to create, and will celebrate every little success, but employees will just be sitting there. There can be a lot of pressure to create, and the company might implement ideas that are less than good enough.
You can read the whole article here.