Creativity and Innovation Management
Managing System for Creative and Innovative Performance
The highly competitive nature of today’s business needs creative and innovative ideas for dominant success. Although good service is the essence of a successful business (in long term), novel ideas are jumping advancements; thus, a company has no chance to win this competitive game in the absence of creativity and innovation.
Innovation Management
Initially, innovation management was formed to provide an efficient managing system for Research & Development (R&D), but it has now spread far beyond this area due to the importance of innovation in various fields of business. In general, innovation management has two main duties to manage both input and output of innovative materials.
In the former case, innovation management must conduct the flow of innovative ideas (like new discoveries) into the organization for subsequent usages. In other words, it is needed to collect all relevant external innovations to serve the internal innovative system.
In the latter case, the internal innovation should be managed in a proper manner. According to the customers needs, an organization always should have new products and services to satisfy their needs. Internal innovative system is responsible for analyzing the external needs, estimating the internal possibilities, and proposing new innovative ideas.
Creative People in Organization
Due to the importance of creativity and innovation for an organization, in a modern management, it is necessary to distinguish creative people. In general, people in technical positions, associated with elite positions (leading the organization strategy), are divided to two groups: creative people and their assistants.
This creative group is divided to two different groups namely initiators and problem solvers. The initiators are indeed creative people who "have that additional mental ability that enables them to recognize previously unrealized problems and to evaluate their importance … It is one thing to have an idea about specific problem; it is quite another to have an idea about what it is that is worth having idea about” (Hilberry 1953).
Although problem solvers are key persons in an organization (particularly in critical situations), the problems should be introduced to them, as they are not problem finders. In other words, problem solvers should follow the initiators (though not exactly the relationship of creative people – assistants).
The initiators are also divided to two distinguishable groups viz. discoverers and inventors. Although these two groups are usually considered identical, they are significantly different. Discoverers work on a higher creative position of the organization by dealing with the question “why?” for analyzing a phenomenon or a problem; but inventors serve the routine performance of the organization by struggling with the question “how” things work and can be made to work better.
It is obvious that distinguishing these creativity-based groups is an important duty of the management system, and is only possible in the light of modern aspects of creativity and innovation management.
Risk Management
Creativity and Innovation management is somehow and somewhat risk management. When dealing with novel creative ideas, the results are not guaranteed at all. Thus, not only it is needed to find, propose, and perform novel creative ideas, but also an essential requirement is to forecast the future performance in action. In general, such managers should be a risk taker, multidimensional analyzer, prospector, futurist, and somehow discreet.
References
J. Balderston, P. Birnbaum, R. Goodman, and M. Stahl, Modern Management Techniques in Engineering and R&D, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1984.
N. Hilberry, Elements of Basic Research Management Philosophy at Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois, 1953.
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