Summary
Collaborative creativity is a prerequisite for the generation of innovation. It is of even greater interest when attempting to move from incremental to radical innovation that aims at huge instead of incremental improvements of products, processes, services, or structures that actually changes social practices. The main objective behind this paper is to call for an extension of the creativity perspective by abandoning an exclusive focus on individual creative capabilities, and extending inner-organizational collaborative creative sources with a goal of creating an "open creativity" system by including external creative sources. In addition to a system's internal creativity (such as of an organization or a region), the synergetic interplay between internal and external sources of creativity at the individual and collaborative levels also needs to be utilized in the attempt to create innovations. In a way, what "open creativity" is for creativity, Chesbrough's "open innovation" is for innovation. This is particularly true with regards to radical innovations. Such an approach is becoming more important as environmental and system complexity increases and also as higher degrees of innovation are required. In order to understand and manage such multifacetted aspects of creativity, the "Planetary Model of Collaborative Creative Problem Solving" is introduced here as a conceptual framework and is correlated with the underlying working process oriented towards the generation of innovations.
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The Concept of Open Creativity: Collaborative Creative Problem Solving for Innovation Generation - a Systems Approach
"I've always been an optimist and I suppose that is rooted in my belief that the power of creativity and intelligence can make the world a better place" (Gates, 2007). This statement, made by Bill Gates, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in the March/April 2007 issue and illustrates a good example of what "unleashing the power of creativity" can do, not only in respect to innovation, but to the entirety of society as well. Creativity as a prerequisite for innovations certainly needs to be investigated from a broad systems perspective and from the viewpoint of various disciplines. To date, many creativity researchers have been too focused on single issues of investigation and have shown little interest in promoting interdisciplinarity with a focus towards greater real world application of innovation processes. While understanding creativity at the level of the individual - as seen in the personality traits approach - complies with the tenets of mainstream psychology (Simonton, 2003; Paulus & Nijstad, 2003), this also seems to be true for most other disciplines, including business sciences, anthropology, and sociology. The current (and relatively restrictive) perspective has only marginal implications for superordinated creativity systems such as organizations and various forms of cross-border cooperation. Although most approaches still lack an exhaustive systems perspective, environmental issues in creative problem solving have been gaining increasing attention within the business sciences, and have served to make the work environment, creative climate and innovation climate the subject of scientific discussion (Amabile & Conti, 1999; Anderson & West, 1994; Brodbeck & Maier, 2001; Ekvall, 1997; Isaksen, Lauer & Ekvall, 1999; Lapierre & Giroux, 2003; Zain, Richardson & Adam, 2002; ). The same is also true for the academic relevance of specific creativity tools (Geschka & Yildiz, 1990; King, 1995; McFadzean, 2000; Schlicksupp, 1999; Smolensky & Kleiner, 1995).
Referring to the need for dealing effectively with creativity in an organizational context, Ford and Gioia stated a decade ago that although it is important as a basis for organizational learning, development, innovation and competitive advantage, there is still a lack of clear and guided instruction with respect to comprehensive creativity management (Ford & Gioia, 1996). In general, this is still true of the vast majority of today's efforts in creativity research. Still, very little effort has been placed on the management of the overall system of creative problem solving. As Simonton (2003) pointed out, comprehensive research of creativity "[...] must view it as a complex phenomenon that occurs at multiple levels, from individuals, interpersonal interactions and problem solving groups to cultures, nations, and civilizations." One reason for the lack of research effort might also be that all-embracing models of creative problem solving processes do not lend themselves readily to scientific investigation (Steiner, 2006; Woodman, Sawyer & Griffin, 1993), even though they are of obvious importance as a prerequisite for the generation of innovations. Woodman et al. (1993) pointed out the dilemma entailed in matching the need for a broad understanding of organizational creativity with the simultaneous fear of doing research on organizational creativity, since "research on organizational creativity will, by definition, cross multiple levels of analysi...See the full content of this document
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