Research: strategies for increasing the creativity of employees in large organizations

This is my research report completed in the last half of 2012. The topic is strategies for increasing the creativity of employees in large organizations.

The short version is there are a lot of factors that influence creativity but if you want some shortcuts then (1) focus on creating positivity, and (2) understand that creativity is more of a social phenomenon and therefore focus on building a social environment that is supportive of creativity.

Also, here are the slides that were used for the verbal presentation though admittedly they could use some notes.

Managing Innovation - Innovation Strategy: Part 1

There are three main ways that organizations grow, these are acquisition, organic growth, and innovation.

Acquisition is the process of buying sources of revenue, in most cases sources of revenue are customers but sometimes acquisition includes capability that the acquiring organisation doesn't have.Effectively this method of growth is the same as investing in the share market - spend money on a going concern to make money.

Organic growth is perhaps the most common method for growing a company. Organic growth is where a company attempts to increase the number of customers who purchase that companies existing goods or services.

Innovation is the third method of growing. This is where the company produces new goods and services and makes these available to the market. One view of innovation is that changes and modifications to existing products and services is also growth through innovation. Basically where an organization is providing a good or service that is not previously available, then this can be perceived as innovative growth. This means that the line between organic growth and innovation can be a grey area. For example, for some a price change can be viewed as a product change while for others this would be seen as organic growth. Your strategy really needs to be clear about what constitutes innovation.

There are various views on how to measure innovation but at a strategic level, this becomes very simple. View the three methods of growing revenue as bars in a graph. A innovation strategy is be interested in how high the innovation bar is in proportion to the remaining methods of growing revenue. In short what is of interest to an innovation strategy is the percentage of new revenue that comes from new products and services.This is the starting point for an innovation strategy as it determines how much (or little) effort is put into innovation.

The detail of the strategy will be interested in what constitutes those new products and services. The next section will cover some of the details that an innovation strategy should include.

Doing two things at once

I have the challenge of wanting to do two things with one block of time. Firstly I want to keep this Blog up to date and secondly, I want to draft up a training module about creativity and innovation in organisations. In the spirit of wanting to have my cake and eat it too, I will draft the training post by post into this blog.

There will be a couple of posts that sort through the rough outline, then I will populate the topcis themselves.

Today's view of the outline is:

1. Definition of and difference between creativity and innovation
2. Potentially the potted history of creativity research
3. Basic outline individual views of creativity (include in other box thinking)
4. Basic outline of organisational models of creativity
5. Factors that encourage or inhibit creativity as individuals
6. The special role of motivation
7. The role of progress in meaningful work
8. Factors that encourage or inhibit creativity within social settings (organisations)
9. The role of leaders
10. How to promote creative ideas within teams

I will need to include a couple of exercises, which will need to be placed somewhere

1. An exercise that demonstrates how a heirarchy screens out creativy ideas
2. An exercise to pull apart a creative innovation so people can see how innovations are made up if upstream pieces of innovation
3. An exercise in divergent thinking? Followed up by a focus on a creative problem.