University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Corporate Creativity
Book

Corporate Creativity

How Innovation and Improvement Actually Happen

Alan G. Robinson and Sam Stern
Berrett-Koehler, 1997
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Editorial Rating

6

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Recommendation

You can improve your company’s performance by increasing creativity and fostering employee innovation. Most creative acts are unexpected. Therein lies your company’s creative potential. A company is creative when its employees do something new and possibly useful without being directly shown or taught. Creativity can and should happen in every organization, including companies with highly standardized procedures. While creativity is intangible, you can see the results of it in your company’s improvements and innovations.The first five chapters provide an overview of creativity, outline the six essential elements that creativity requires. In the following chapters, the authors detail the six elements, provide several case studies to illustrate their points and show how to achieve each aspect of creativity. This is a useful book for any executive who wants his or her company, and the people in it, to realize their full creative potential. getAbstract recommends this book to managers and executives in any industry.

Summary

The True Nature of Corporate Creativity

The true nature of corporate creativity is that most creative acts are unplanned and unexpected. A company is creative when its employees do something new and possibly useful without being directly being shown or taught. Creativity can and should happen in every organization, including companies with highly standardized procedures. You can see the results of corporate creativity in improvements (corporate changes) and innovations (entirely new corporate activities). While you cannot predict who will generate creative ideas, what the ideas will be or when they will occur, you can increase the likelihood of creativity in your company.

The No-Preconceptions Principle

Preconceptions about who will be creative, what they do and how they do it, limit your company’s creativity. The firm’s real strength lies in promoting and recognizing creativity from all employees. Most creative acts come from employees who are not regarded as particularly creative. You cannot know in advance:

  1. Who will initiate a creative act
  2. What it will be
  3. When it will occur
  4. How it...

About the Authors

Alan G. Robinson is professor of management at the Isenburg School of Management, University of Massachusetts. He has researched corporate creativity in companies worldwide, including in Japan, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, India, China and Russia. He has served as a consultant to more than 50 companies on the subject of creativity. Sam Stern is professor of education at Oregon State University and has taught at Harvard University’s Department of Economics. From 1990-1992, he served as Professor of Creativity Development at the Japan Management Association and led a research team in the study of creativity in 200 companies. He has acted as advisor in creativity to such companies as Hewlett-Packard, NASA and Polaroid.

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