Introduction
Humans have always endeavored towards achieving some degree of creativity in whatever they engage in. For any organization that aims at achieving reasonable performance, innovation must be at the heart of its strategies.
“Some hold that the capacity to harness intellectual and social capital and to convert that into novel and appropriate things; has become the critical organizational requirement of the age” (Reid and Brentani, 2008, p. 562).
A flurry of interest in creativity and innovation in the workplace has occasioned an abrupt shift to knowledge economies. This paper uses different theories and models to show why development of innovation and creativity in an organization may be considered arguable.
Creativity
Creativity can be defined as the development or generation of new ideas or concepts while innovation can be referred to as the application of a developed idea (Drucker, 2010). Creativity is a mental process and plays a major role in innovation process. Creativity requires interest and much commitment. It may include generating new concepts and ideas, and discovering solutions to existing problems.
To an organization, creativity may be referred to as risk taking. Employees may take creativity to be an opportunity to learn more skills (Reid and Brentano, 2008).
To develop creativity, organizations need to train leaders and managers on new skills. The people who are involved in the innovation process should be coached, and the organization should also adapt to initiatives that will help change the culture. Leaders and managers need to adopt creativity if they need their organization to be competent.
Innovation
Innovation seeks to actualize a created idea or concept through application of workable procedures and processes.
In an organization, innovation can be viewed in three different perspectives, that is, service or product innovation in which the organization may seek to create different products or services to enhance their productivity; operational innovation (this is the idea of an organization working to improve on how given procedures and processes are undertaken), and business model perspective.
Essentially, organizations aim at restructuring the financial model. This may be done in cases where costs need to be reduced (Gupta and Wilemon, 2010).
For innovation to be effective, organizations have to work on measures that can ensure that creativity is fostered. This can be achieved by introduction of team work where all the members of the team are allowed to exploit their talents (Reid and Brentani, 2008). With team work, people work in close collaboration.
This helps in acquisition of new skills and exchange of knowledge and ideas. Creativity and innovation is a major part of an organizational growth. It helps an organization by enhancing productivity (Kanter, 2010).
Model of creativity and its organizational application/critical evaluation of the model
According to Teresa Amabile’s theory of creativity, a good model of creativity should include expertise, creative thinking, and task motivation. All of these three components are important in any given area of creativity (Mumford and Licuanan, 2008). Any creative work depends on expertise.
This component comprises of things like talents of the workers, their technical skills and knowledge of the tasks they handle.This component is important in solving problems in an organization.
In a bioengineering organization, the engineers may be required to have knowledge on how to design new medical equipments for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes, set up and maintain biomedical equipment, test the effectiveness, efficiency and safety of equipments, provide analysis of the patient data via the computer, diagnose and interpret bioelectric data using signal processing techniques, measure and monitor physiological systems.
The bio-engineer is expected to familiarize with past bioengineering developments which are essential in perfecting the assigned tasks. The engineer is also expected to check on potential developments of the bio-engineering field. Creativity and innovation may fail to develop in such an organization when the engineers fail to perform to the best of their talents.
The engineers may not be willing to spend time in analyzing and checking for the past and future developments in the field. In cases where the engineers are not assigned tasks on the basis of their talents and skills, the outcome of their processes and procedures may not be effective. The engineers may also find it hard to acquire the new skills required in the assigned section and thus their creativity is hindered.
Acquisition of new skills in the bio-engineering field may require training, if the organization is not ready to facilitate the training, the engineers will not be able to acquire the new skills. In this case, innovation is hindered. Cases may occur where the trained bio-engineers fail to practice the acquired skills.
As a result, their work lacks efficiency. Creative thinking is essential if an organization is to develop its creativity and innovation. This is a more personal related component since it focuses on the self-discipline of the workers, their will in taking risks, their perseverance and their independence (Gupta and Wilemon, 2010).
Creative skills supplement expertise. These creative skills require a worker to take a new look on problem solving and application of certain techniques to explore new methodologies of performing tasks. In order to achieve creativity, a worker needs to work passionately and make the working environment conducive for the accomplishment of the assigned tasks (Nonaka and Nishiguchi, 2010).
In a bio-engineering organization, a bio-engineer should be able to think far beyond the expectation of common experimental results, that is; the engineer should be able to allow variation of the results from the norm. When the results of an experiment do not fall in the normal category, the engineer should be able to visualize the cause of the deviation rather than force the results to suit the expected outcome.
When analyzing data from different procedures, an engineer should not only stick to the normal methods used. In its place, the engineer should try and apply new programs that might bring about the same result in a more efficient way.
Instead of producing related data with different programs, an engineer should think of one program that can be able to handle all correlated data at once. An engineer should also be able to devise ways in which machines can work collaboratively when performing related diagnostic procedures.
Creative thinking may be a challenge to many engineers based on the fact that many of them have become accustomed to the norms of their work. Engineers may not be willing to take risks regarding new perspectives of experiments due to the fear of the outcome. Engineers may prefer handling related tasks separately rather than collaboratively since the workload may increase.
In such circumstances, creativity and the innovation of an organization are compromised. Expertise and creative thinking should be supplemented with task motivation if creativity and innovation is to be developed. Task motivation determines what the employee will do.
This component of motivation may be viewed from two viewpoints, that is; extrinsic motivation (this type of motivation is driven by incentives that an employee receives on attaining a given goal); and intrinsic motivation (an employee is driven by personal interest of knowing more.
It is more of a personal challenge since the employee strives to enjoy the tasks and find fulfillment in what they do). Intrinsic motivation plays a major role in creativity and innovation (Montoya-Weiss and O’Driscol, 2009).
Employees who are driven by extrinsic motivation may tend to fix procedures just to achieve the expected target. Most organizations reward their employees who perform well in implementing certain ideas and concepts.
Most employees will fix procedures to attain particular goals that can be rewarded. With this mentality, workers will prefer working the “fix it” way instead of doing the right thing. The “fix it “ way may cost the organization a great deal since it may only work in the short term but not in the long term (Kanter, 2010). Such practices offer a big challenge in the development of creativity and innovation in organizations
In a bio-engineering set up, an engineer should strive to enjoy the assigned tasks and do them with ease. Creativity and innovation may not be developed in cases where the engineers are seeking to outdo others. The managers also play an important role in ensuring that employees remain motivated. Managers who reward their employees will achieve much.
Most organizations are not ready to incur extra cost in rewarding their employees. In such cases, the employees will not be motivated to work hard. Even though they may have the required expertise and creative, they may not exercise them accordingly (Drucker, 2010).
Conclusion
For creativity and innovation to be developed, all stakeholders of an organization should be at their best both at individual and collaborative level. The workers in the organization should be willing to exploit their talents and be willing to explore new ideas.
The managers should be able to provide a good environment that will enable the workers to work efficiently. They should also be able to facilitate the implementation of new ideas (Eisenhardt, 2009).
References
Drucker, P. F., 2010. The Coming of the New Organization. In Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management, 21 (3), pp. 1-20.
Eisenhardt, K. M., 2009. Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review. The Academy of Management Review, 14 (1), pp. 57-74.
Gupta, A. K. and Wilemon, D. L., 2010. Accelerating the development of technology- based new products. California Management Review, 32 (2), pp. 24-44.
Kanter, R. M., 2010. When a thousand flowers boom: Structural, collective, and social conditions for innovation in organization. Research in Organization Behavior, 10 (3), pp. 169-211.
Montoya-Weiss, M. M. and O’Driscoll, T. M., 2009. From experience: Applying performance support technology in the fuzzy front end. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 17 (2), pp. 143-161.
Mumford, M. D. and Licuanan, B., 2008. Leading for innovation: Conclusions, issues, and directions. Leadership Quarterly, 15 (1), pp. 163-171.
Nonaka, I. and Nishiguchi, T., 2010. Knowledge emergence: Social, technical, and evolutionary dimensions of knowledge creation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reid, S. E. and Brentani, U., 2008. The fuzzy front end of new product development for discontinuous innovations: A theoretical model. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 21 (2), pp. 170-184.