9 - Innovation and Creativity in Organisations: Individual and work team Research Findings and Implications for Government Policy

Summary

INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

Facing rapid technological changes and being challenged, for example by emerging markets, today's organisations have to adapt quickly in order to maintain or, ideally, to increase their effectiveness. Within this scope the development and adoption of innovations have become a critical determinant of organisational productivity, competitiveness, and longevity. Hence, it is not surprising that a major research effort has focused on variables that facilitate or hinder the development and implementation of innovations (Howell and Higgins 1990). The aim and scope of the present chapter is to present an overview of existing research findings into innovation and creativity in the workplace as these relate to potential government policies for innovation facilitation in the Netherlands. By necessity, as many of the applied studies originate from the disciplines of organisational psychology and management sciences, these disciplines constitute the predominant theoretical perspective adopted in this chapter. Given this disciplinary background, this chapter considers in detail two particular ‘levels of analysis’ with regard to creativity and innovation in workplace settings: (1) Individual creativity and work role innovation and (2) work group creativity and team-level innovation.

One of our main reasons for focusing upon these two levels of analysis was the WRR summary description of this whole project area itself. To quote from the homepage related to the project on ‘Innovation: The Need for Renewal’:

“The fundamental unit of analysis is people in interaction with other people, within and between businesses, with businesses, macro-conditions and institutions as ‘enabling constraints’. The analysis at micro-level provides a basis for recommendations which are largely situated at the institutional level” (http://www.WRR.nl/english/content.jsp?objectid=3949&pid=3947).

Whilst other, more macro levels of analysis undoubtedly exist with regard to organisational innovation (the organisational level of analysis), and the diffusion of innovations across industrial sectors or organisations (the societal level of analysis), the focus of this chapter is intentionally more micro- and meso-analytical in orientation. Creativity in individual work roles can build to transform organisational performance overall. The implementation of new and improved ways of doing things in organisations can, and does, occur primarily at the individual and work-team levels of analysis (Anderson, De Dreu and Nijstad 2004; West, 2002), and so these two primary levels of foci for this chapter are justifiable.