International Journal of Innovation Management

Vol. 20, No. 4 (May 2016) 1602001 (19 pages)

© World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd.
DOI: 10.1142/S1363919616020011

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION: STATE OF THE ART

AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES FOR RESEARCH

ALEXANDER BREM*
Mads Clausen Institute, SDU Innovation and Design Engineering
University of Southern Denmark, Alsion 2, 6400 Sønderborg, Denmark
brem@mci.sdu.dk

ROGELIO PUENTE-DIAZ
Department of Business and Economics, Universidad Anahuac
Mexico Norte. Av. Universidad Anahuac No. 46, Col. Lomas de Anahuac
Huixquilucan, Estado de Mexico, CP 52786, Mexico
rogelio.puente@anahuac.mx

MARINE AGOGUÉ
Management Department, HEC Montreal!
3000 Chemin Côte Ste Catherine, H3T2A7 Montreal, QC, Canada
marine.agogue@hec.ca

Published 3 May 2016

Creativity is a vibrant field of scientific research with important applied implications for
the management of innovation. In this article, we argue that the proliferation of creativity
research has led to positive and less positive outcomes and discuss five relevant research
themes. We first introduce our readers to the different proposed dimensions of a creative
object. Next, we explain recent developments on the level of the creativity magnitude
issue. Based on that, we review how researchers currently operationalize creativity. After
discussing how creativity is conceptualized and operationalized, we outline how it might
be enhanced. Finally, we present an overview of the wide variety of methodological
approaches currently used in creativity research. We close by calling for more interdis-
ciplinary research and offering other suggestions for future directions.

Keywords: Creativity; Innovation; Ideation; Creative Thinking; Creative Performance;

Magnitude.

⁄
Corresponding author.

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Creativity Research and Innovation: State of the Art

and Future Perspectives
What do a German business scholar, a Mexican psychologist and a French
engineer (the three guest editors for this special issue) have in common? Appar-
ently not much, besides their interest in doing research on creativity and inno-
vation. As a matter of fact, this interest in creativity and innovation is widely
shared. Indeed, governments, companies, research centers, universities and
schools spend a great deal of time trying to understand how to be more creative
and innovate, as well as to be more creative in order to innovate. Creativity and
innovation are at the core of important outcomes such as economic and sales
growth, scientific production and students’ learning (Reiter-Palmon et al., 2014).
Hence, it is not surprising to find scientific articles, intervention programs, con-
ferences, seminars, consulting offers and casual conversations on creativity and
innovation across a wide variety of disciplines, including business and manage-
ment, marketing, engineering, design, psychology and education, and among
different segments of the population ranging from managers and consultants to
research scientists and educators. The proliferation of the interest in understanding
creativity and its relationship with innovation is, in part, what fueled our moti-
vation to organize and develop this special issue on “Creativity in Innovation
Management” with the contribution of accomplished researchers from different
countries and disciplines. However, like most things in life, the proliferation of
interest in creativity has led to positive and less positive outcomes.
On the positive side, we now have literally thousands of dedicated researchers
and practitioners trying to better understand what drives creativity, how creativity
can be enhanced and the implications of creativity for the management of inno-
vation, among other aspects. It is safe to assume that this dedicated, genuine
interest is producing useful information. The amount of knowledge generated is
indeed vast and addresses very specific cross-disciplinary topics in regards to
creativity, ranging from knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer aspects of
creativity to the motivational components of creativity, to mention a few examples.
On the less positive side, the observed proliferation has resulted in a highly
fragmented field (Hennessey and Amabile, 2010). Similarly, it also led to having
many research areas showing a wide variety of perspectives with different levels of
consensus. On the one hand, this observed fragmentation might not be efficient if
that new knowledge production does not entirely come from “all” we know about
creativity but rather from what different researchers consider important to know,
given their domain of expertise. Hence, two researchers, one from engineering and
another from psychology, might have a research topic in common but read and
consult different journals, attend different conferences and have disagreements

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about what constitutes a significant contribution in creativity research. On the

other hand, the abundance of different perspectives on the same issue can lead to a
lack of consensus on what the main directions for future research are in order to
increase our understanding of creativity as a part of the innovation process. In the
worst case, it even leads to a complete parallel development of research streams
without even knowing that the others exist. Even though nowadays knowledge is
available worldwide through modern information technologies, the knowledge is
still dispersed over disciplines, countries, languages, subject fields and even
publication formats like journals or books.
The composition of articles of this special issue and the conformation of the
team of guest editors (one former engineer teaching at a business school, one
psychologist also teaching at a business school, and a business scholar doing
research at an engineering school) reflect this proliferation of interest. Hence, the
purpose of our editorial is threefold. First, we offer an illustrative and not com-
prehensive discussion on five issues relevant for creativity and their implications
for innovation. We propose that these five issues represent important research
themes for future knowledge production. Second, we propose some key directions
for future research. Third, we briefly introduce our readers to the articles included
in the special issue on “Creativity in Innovation Management”.
As stated earlier, we organize our paper around five main sections that en-
compass the issues that are at the core of this editorial. In Sec. 1, we discuss the
conceptualization of creativity in terms of its dimensionality. We then cover, in
Sec. 2, the level of creativity magnitude, followed by a discussion on how
researchers operationalize creativity in theme three. In Sec. 4, we explain how
creativity can be enhanced. Last, in Sec. 5, we discuss the diversity of approaches
used to conduct research on creativity and examine in more depth the implica-
tions of the fragmentation of the field. Before beginning our discussion of our
first theme, two caveats are in order. First, our goal is to illustrate rather than
comprehensively review all the information available on these research areas.
Second, our main goal is to provide an illustration of these five issues, pointing
out the level of agreement and disagreement for each, and not to provide or
propose a new theoretical model capable of integrating all the information
available.

The Dimensionality of Creativity

Clear conceptual definitions of scientific constructs can act as a catalyst for the
growth and integration of applied and theoretical knowledge. It creates common
understandings that are prerequisites of an effective exchange of ideas, and to

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develop a joint knowledge base (Suddaby, 2010). Apparently, such clear inter-
disciplinary definitions are not set yet.
The conceptual definition of creativity might focus on the person, process or
product. Yet more efforts have been devoted to provide a conceptual definition for
a creative product since it is assumed that the result of a creative process or a
creative personality is an object (it may be a product, a service or an organization)
that must be considered as creative. Hence, we focus on reviewing the concep-
tualization of creativity as it relates to objects, describing the number of dimen-
sions proposed in order to consider something as creative, and examining some
possible relations between the suggested dimensions. It is important to mention the
following caveat. The main goal of this section is not to conduct an exhaustive but
rather a more illustrative review of some of the proposed dimensions of creativity.
Hence, we do not claim to have reviewed every single article proposing different
dimensions of creativity. Instead, we focus on reviewing a few selected articles
with important implications for creativity in the process of innovation.
From reviewing different articles on the conceptualization of creativity, we see two
main issues related to the dimensionality of creativity. The first deals with the number
and nature of the dimensions proposed. The second deals with the suggested structure or
relationships between these dimensions. Both issues have important implications for
understanding and conducting research on creativity and also for managing creativity.
We begin with the discussion of the dimensionality of creativity.
We can trace back some of the first definitions of creativity to 1953 (Stein,
1953). This definition suggests that a creative work must be novel and useful for a
group of people in some point in time. Hence, the definition emphasizes two
dimensions: novelty and usefulness but also proposes that an object becomes
creative when people judge it to be creative in a given socio-cultural context.
Researchers across different disciplines such as organizational psychology, man-
agement and engineering seem to agree that a creative production must be novel
and useful (Amabile, 1983; Anderson et al., 2014; Cropley and Cropley, 2005).
Hence, there seems to be some degree of consensus on the novelty and usefulness
dimensions of creativity. Yet, other dimensions have also been proposed.
For example, a recent conceptual contribution proposed that surprise should be
added to the novelty and usefulness dimensions (Simonton, 2012). The suggestion
to add surprise comes from the criteria set by the U.S. patent office when deciding
to give a certain product a patent. Similarly, two additional conceptualizations
agreed that a creative product must have novelty and usefulness. Yet one con-
ceptualization added the dimension of elegance (Cropley and Cropley, 2005), the
other suggested a dimension of style, both referring to the design of a particular
product (O’Quin and Besemer, 2006). Elegance and style might be related to the
aesthetic appeal of a product. A similar proposition has been made to assess the
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creativity of advertising. Specifically, a three-dimensional conceptualization has

proposed that advertising products need to have novelty, usefulness and surprise in
order to be considered as creative (West et al., 2013).
Another conceptualization also incorporates novelty but divides usefulness in
two subcomponents as part of its conceptual definition: feasibility and value. The
authors claim that dividing usefulness in two components can have important
research and managerial implications (Litchfield et al., 2015). For example, an
idea for a new product with high novelty and value might not be perceived as
feasible because it is “too different” from what the company has done in the past.
Conversely, an idea with high novelty and high feasibility but low value might be
easily accepted by managers but might lack enough value to really make a dif-
ference in the market place.
In sum, most creativity researchers agree that a creative object, may it be a
product, service, advertising commercial or marketing campaign must be novel and
useful. Different conceptualizations disagree on the third dimension. More impor-
tantly however, is the discussion on whether an object can be considered as creative if
it has novelty but not usefulness or if it is useful but not novel. The core of this debate
is the structure or relationship between the suggested dimensions of creativity.
For example, one proposition suggests that the relationship between the different
dimensions of creativity is multiplicative. Hence, this model proposes that creativity
¼ novelty X usefulness X surprise. A multiplicative model implies that if a given
object has a value of 0 on either of the three components, the overall creativity would
be zero. Indeed the measurement representation of the dimensions of creativity can
have important implications. Whereas one conceptualization might assume a one-
factor model with indicators of novelty and usefulness (Zhou and George, 2001),
another one might assume a two-factor solution with reflective or formative indi-
cators (Sullivan and Ford, 2010). The implications of adopting any of these options
are not trivial since it could lead to different methodological approaches and results.

The Level of Creativity Magnitude

A closely related issue to the dimensions of creativity is the level of creativity
magnitude. This issue becomes relevant because researchers can focus on un-
derstanding the creative objects generated by geniuses, professionals, “regular”
individuals or even children. It is obvious that the predictors or consequences of
creative geniuses or children are not the same, emphasizing the need to differen-
tiate between different levels of creativity.
Different models have been proposed to guide our understanding of levels of
creativity. One, for example, makes a distinction between personal and historical

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creativity (Boden, 2004). Whereas in personal creativity individuals make a per-

sonal judgement as to how novel or useful their own ideas are, in historical
creativity a wider audience makes such judgment.
A more robust model proposes four levels of creativity called: Mini-c, Little-c,
Pro-c and Big-C (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009). These four levels form a de-
velopmental continuum that starts with Mini-c. Mini-c level of creativity is
characterized by being primarily a personal judgment and is grounded in indi-
vidual learning processes. For example, individuals might experience a feeling of
being creative when learning about the different media outlets available to ad-
vertise their new product. This insight might not have great external value, but it is
important for individuals since it provides positive feelings about the learning
process. Little-c creativity, continuing with the same example, might be repre-
sented by a novice brand manager’s suggestion to use more social media in their
marketing communication efforts because the brand’s target is mainly teenagers.
While the suggestion is useful and well-thought, it might not represent a ground-
breaking idea. In other terms, Little-c creativity can be seen as everyday creativity.
Pro-c includes the creative productions generated by experts in a given field.
Hence, an excellent advertising campaign that is able to increase sales by a sig-
nificant percentage might represent an example of Pro-c creativity. The creative
product, an advertising campaign, generates positive outcomes for a brand/com-
pany, yet it does not have worldwide recognition. Last, Big-C creativity represents
the highest level of creative magnitude that only selected people are able to
achieve in their lifetime. Whereas it is easier to mention examples of Big-C from
science or music such as the theory of evolution developed by Darwin or the fifth
symphony composed by Beethoven, it is not as easy to think of examples from the
private sector. Yet, some might place the invention of the internet or the smart-
phone as products that are highly novel and useful and widely accepted by a large
percentage of the world population.
From this brief discussion of the levels of creativity magnitude, the connection
between the dimensions of creativity and the levels of creativity becomes obvious.
Objects with different levels of creativity magnitude would have, hypothetically,
different scores on the novelty, usefulness and eventually surprise or aesthetics
dimensions. For instance, if one was to evaluate the internet as a product, it would
probably have very high scores on novelty, usefulness and surprise. Conversely, the
evaluation of a popular product such as the headphones Beats® would also have high
but lower scores on novelty, usefulness and surprise than the invention of the internet.
The elaboration on the level of creativity magnitude has met great recognition
in the psychology literature, but remains confined in this field, raising several
questions in regards to its operationalization. Typically, while the four C model of
creativity has been useful and people seem to recognize different levels of
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creativity (Puente-Diaz et al., 2016), to our knowledge, it does not provide precise
criteria for deciding, for example, if an object should be classified as Pro-c or
Big-C. Yet, one might argue that something similar happens with most judgments
of creativity and even with the classification of presumably more objective phe-
nomena such as the diagnosis of diabetes based on the levels of blood glucose or
the diagnosis of hypertension based on blood pressure.
It is also accepted in the field of creativity that a product becomes creative when
individuals agree that it is creative (Amabile, 1996). A product with “great” po-
tential becomes a success only when thousands of consumers agree, explicitly or
implicitly, that the product is novel, useful, and surprising. Take the iPhoneTM as an
example. Up to December of 2015, Apple has reported unit sales of 231.22 million
iPhones in 2015.1 If we take into account that the world population is about 7.3
billion and assuming that iPhone sales represent “unique” buyers, then we could
claim that more than 3% of the world has bought an iPhone in 2015. Hence even
though consumers are not explicitly making a judgment about the novelty, use-
fulness and surprise of the iPhone, we might safely conclude that this product is
extremely creative based on its success in the market. However, one could also
argue that this goes beyond the concept of creativity, as innovation is defined as “the
development and implementation of new ideas (…)” (Van den Ven, 1986: 590).
Hence, the implementation part is the practical agreement by consumers to purchase
the product. This understanding of innovation puts novelty, usefulness and surprise
as prerequisites of a successful implementation of an idea, rather than a result.

The Operationalization of Creativity

If we consider creativity as a multi-dimensional construct with different degrees of
creativity magnitude, then it follows that the operationalization of creativity needs
to be discussed as well. Indeed, the issue of the operationalization of creativity
focuses on how researchers are currently determining that a product, service, or
process is creative. Due to the different degrees of creativity magnitude,
researchers and managers need alternatives for operationalizing creativity. As
stated previously, we focus on discussing only a few alternatives on how to
measure creativity with a special emphasis on measuring the creativity of products
(for a comprehensive review, see Kaufman et al., 2008).
There are several rating scales designed to measure the creativity of products,
processes, services, and advertising outputs. For example, one scale, the Creative

1
See Statista, http://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-
2007/ for information.

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Solution Diagnosis Scale (CSDS), was designed to measure the creativity of pro-
ducts with implications for innovation management (Cropley et al., 2011). This scale
uses 27 items to measure five components: relevance and effectiveness, pro-
blematization, propulsion, elegance, and genesis. Scores from this scale have shown
appropriate psychometric properties in terms of factorial validity and reliability. In
addition, scores from these five components have been able to predict overall cre-
ativity judgments. Some advantages of this scale are that it is easy to administer, it has
been tested with non-experts, and it is based on a theoretical model of functional
creativity. One major limitation is that the scores have not been tested for predictive
validity, an issue highly relevant for innovation managers. A difficult, yet important
test for the predictive validity of this scale would involve obtaining scores on the five
dimensions for different products and correlating the scores with indicators of market
performance across time (e.g., market share, sales, top of mind), while controlling for
other variables known to influence the indicators of market performance. If the scores
from this scale are meaningful, then one would expect high scores on relevance or
propulsion, for example, to correlate positively with market share or sales.
The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) involves asking a group of
judges — mainly experts but non-experts have been used as well — to judge how
creative an object is (Amabile, 1982). One strength of the CAT is that it is
consistent with a conceptual definition of creativity, which proposes “A product or
response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree
that is creative” (Amabile, 1982: 1001). With regards to the specific procedure,
judges are asked to place the products or objects being evaluated in one of five
categories ranging from very uncreative to very creative. Because judges are asked
to make their evaluations in relation to the objects being evaluated, the resulting
judgments can only be interpreted in relation to these objects. In other words, the
creativity evaluations cannot be used to make comparisons outside that specific
judgment task, which represents a limitation.
In terms of the psychometric properties of this technique, the judgments appear
to be reliable across evaluators (Amabile, 1996). In terms of validity, the assess-
ment has face validity since it appears to measure what is supposed to measure.
The ability of the CAT scores to predict important outcomes such as market
success is more limited since the judgments are only relevant within task com-
parisons. Yet despite its limitation, the CAT has been widely used across different
studies and settings (Kaufman et al., 2008).

Impacting Creative Performance

Now that we have discussed how creativity is conceptualized and operationalized,
we are in a better position to explain how creativity might be enhanced, and to
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identify potential managerial factors that may boost creative performance. Over
the last two decades, the field of studies on actually managing creativity in or-
ganizational contexts has adopted three main angles.

(1) Environmental factors that positively influence creativity in an organization

(Amabile and Mukti, 2008).
(2) Leadership competencies that are relevant to manage for creativity (Mueller
et al., 2011).
(3) Tools, techniques and methods that can manage creative thinking by being
deployed to stimulate creativity in collective settings (Paulus and Yang, 2000).

Organizing for creativity is a challenge for firms that face intensive innovation
in competitive contexts. To address this challenge, it has been argued that firms
must rely on specific capabilities to foster creative behaviour: The aim is therefore
to develop peripheral factors that can positively influence creativity, while not
directly modifying the creative process in it-self. One of the most advocated
concepts on the topic is the notion of creative climate (Amabile et al., 1996;
Amabile, 1998). This concept builds on the specific representations that an indi-
vidual has in regards with the “what” (relations), the “how” (means) and the “why”
(outcomes) of a given situation, and which stimulates creativity (Isaksen and
Ekvall, 2010). Many studies have examined the elements that may constitute a
creative climate, including the degree of individual freedom, the quality of
support towards new ideas, a clear and inspiring vision provided by supervisors,
and creative encouragement, among others (see Hunter et al., 2007 for a
complete meta study on the relationships between climate dimensions and creative
performance).
Focusing more precisely on the influence of management on creative perfor-
mance, another stream of research investigating the operationalization of creativity
addresses the role of leadership. Leading creatively can be defined as the ability to
lead a group or an organization towards new and innovative paths (Mueller et al.,
2011). Creative leaders are able to generate new ideas, but also help enhancing the
creativity of other team members. In addition to traditional leadership compe-
tencies such as planning, analysing and decision-making, Palus and Horth (2005)
explain that creative leaders must possess an ability to pay attention to the creative
process of others by asking questions, reframing problems and developing con-
nections between the personal passions and the daily work of team members. This
take on creative leadership describes a more direct capacity to change the course of
a creative process by orienting the nature of ideas that may emerge.
But favouring creativity is not just designing specific managerial devices that
may indirectly favour creativity. Creative thinking has been argued to be actually

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directly manageable, since the advent of brainstorming in the 1960s (Osborn,

1962). Brainstorming is a creativity technique that builds on four main rules that
structure a group session of ideation with a facilitator: (1) withhold judgment, (2)
encourage wild ideas, (3) quantity rather than quality, and (4) build on others’
ideas. Yet, many studies in cognitive psychology have demonstrated that a group
using a brainstorming method generates significantly less ideas than the combined
total of ideas generated by the same number of individuals brainstorming alone
(Diehl and Stroebe, 1987). Many social causes of brainstorming inefficiency have
been experimentally identified, such as attention division (Mulligan and Hartman,
1996; Paulus and Yang, 2000), social pressure (Camacho and Paulus, 1995),
perceived expertness upon creativity (Collaros and Anderson, 1969), among
others. Therefore, today there are wide ranges of management tools, methods and
techniques that are currently investigated to palliate brainstorming shortcomings.
Searching for “creativity tools” on Google generates more than 120,000 results,
widely pointing to diverse methodologies, either theory-driven or empirically
based, that aim at fostering creativity. However, the studies discussing the rele-
vance of brainstorming never measure the performance of the facilitator of
brainstorming, who may encapsulates, while a major part of the success of a
brainstorming is based on it. One can easily understand why this role is complex to
model and integrate in an experimental protocol. This is indeed a participant who
cannot be naive about the objectives of the experiment to which she/he would take
part, while her/his training as well as understanding of the issues of the ideation
session would be essential to the experimental protocol. Yet, in a way, the liter-
ature investigating the methods and tools to enhance the generation of creative
ideas does not relate to the studies on creative leadership or on creative climate,
eluding the fact that tools are never independent of the actors that deploy and/or
enact them.

Methodological Approaches to Creativity

As we have started to underline in the previous sections, a wide set of methods has
been deployed from an academic stance to study creativity, depending on the aim
but also on the facet of creativity that is under study. Four main types of methods
stand out today.
First, at the individual level, creativity is mostly studied (and measured)
through the administration of individual questionnaires. The measure of creativity
is then based on self-report, such as the creativity scale that measures creativity
levels, through a specific derivative of the adjective check list (Gough, 1979) and
the Kirton Adaption-innovation Inventory (KAI) that measures creative style

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(see Bobic et al. (1999) for scale and validity). This psychometric-based approach
produces correlational studies focusing on individual traits that may be linked to
creative performance. All classical traits studied in psychology and organizational
behaviour have therefore been examined as potential predictors of the capacity to
act creatively (Feist, 1998): among them are psychological preferences using Myer
Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) scales (Fleenor and Taylor, 1994), or locus of
control (Pannells and Claxton, 2008). Research is still providing new constructs
and new scales to be the most accurate and consistent creativity assessment tool,
especially as the validity of such scales is questioned on a regular basis (Plucker
and Runco, 1998).
Still at the individual level, a very different angle has been treated through the use
of experiments: these in-lab measures aim at characterizing creative abilities. Two
main classes of creative abilities have been explored. Fist, divergent thinking tasks
evaluate the capacity of individuals to generate many different ideas from a single
starting point. Typically, an alternative use task is formulated as to ask the partic-
ipant to propose as many original alternative uses of a common object — for
instance a brick (see the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) (Torrance,
1972)). Variants of the task may encompass more visual elements, where the ex-
aminee is asked to complete a series of 12 incomplete drawings in an original way
and create a title (Williams, 1980), or more social elements, where the participant
must indicate the consequences of unlikely events such as “What would happen if
gravity were cut in half?” (Merrifield et al., 1962). Yet, another very different way to
experiment on creative abilities is to use creative problem solving settings, such as
in the remote association task (Mednick, 1962). In these tasks, the participant is
asked to find one (and only one) answer to a problem, using his/her creativity. For
instance, in the Remote Association Test (RAT), the examinee is given 3 words and
has to find the word that relates to these 3 words: given the words “rat, blue,
cottage”, the expected answer will be cheese. This creative problem solving ap-
proach extends to more real settings, where either the task is composed of real
elements (for instance: “Design a device that allows people to pick up a book from a
shelf (e.g. in a library) that is out of their reach, for instance, above their head”)
(Cardoso and Badke-Schaub, 2011), or the participants are real employees given a
real problem related to their work environment (Robinson-Morral et al., 2013).
Third, beyond the sole individual level, many qualitative case studies have
focused on methods, tools and techniques deployed in teams, firms and organi-
zations to support different facets of creativity. Because methods and tools are
deeply contingent to the context of their application and are empirically based
rather than theoretically driven, case studies focusing on the specific creativity
practices are necessary to explore the complexity of the processes in place.
Thus, through case studies, researchers have explored the use of serious games
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A. Brem, R. Puente-Diaz & M. Agogué

(Agogue et al., 2015), software design (Arrighi et al., 2015), and manual modeling
(Schulz et al., 2015) of digital tools (Franklin et al., 2013 to cite a few very recent
published works in 2015).
Last, organizational level questionnaire-based studies aim at building, but this
time at a macro-level, correlational studies focusing on managerial factors — for
instance style of leadership (Gumusluoglu and Ilsev, 2009; Moss and Ritossa,
2007), motivation (Zhang and Bartol, 2010), or Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)
— on creative performance in a collective setting. These questionnaires differ
greatly of those administrated at the individual level, as they are indeed not based
on self-report but more on supervisor, employee and peer reporting.
Thus, studying creativity is not just complex due to the very different facets of
creativity, but also due to the proliferation of methodological stances that can be
chosen. To be fair, the fragmentation issue of the field is not just about the choice
of method, but also the discipline of academics as well as the field of expertise of
readers. Typically, innovation managers prefer certain conferences and journals
(e.g. Technology and Innovation Management, Research-Technology Manage-
ment), so do management scholars (e.g., Journal of Product and Innovation
Management, Creativity and Innovation Management, and International Journal of
Innovation Management), psychologists (e.g. Journal of Creative Behavior, Cre-
ativity Research Journal, Thinking Skills and Creativity, Psychology of Aesthetics,
Creativity, and the Arts), industrial designers (e.g. Design Science, Design Stud-
ies), and engineers (e.g. Research in Engineering Design, Journal in Engineering
Design, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation). These journals
reflect the disparity of the field but also the too-often single focus chosen by
researchers to conform to a specific discipline and to frame a contribution that fits
with the conversation in the journal and the expectations of the audience. What are
the implications of this fragmentation? Most importantly, it sheds light on the
current difficulties to do cross-disciplinary research as well as the difficulties to
have a coherent view of the field to estimate the significance of a research con-
tribution to the creativity body of knowledge. This is all the more crucial as the
interdisciplinary understanding of creativity is key for organizations. In companies
typically the (corporate) innovation management is a fertile ground where inter-
disciplinary discussions from different departments and functional areas take place
and grow. There the key task of the staff is to manage innovation across organi-
zational and functional boundaries, so all strategic and operative initiatives to
develop and diffuse new products take place (Brem and Voigt, 2009).
In sum, one of the objectives of our paper was to briefly discuss five relevant
themes in creativity research and their implications for innovation management.
As suggested earlier, the explosion of creativity research has generated a great deal
of theoretical and applied knowledge. The amount of knowledge generated is so
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vast that now we might have the challenge of assimilating, internalizing, and
integrating what we know thus far with the objective of determining what we need
to know next. Creativity is definitely an exciting area of research and this ex-
citement is widely shared by our creativity scholars, including all the authors for
this special issue.

Directions for Future Research

As shown through our paper, creativity is a vibrating field with important impli-
cations for different academic fields. Yet, if the field of creativity wants to continue
growing, more research is needed across different research themes. Based on our
discussion of five aspects of creativity research and its linkages to innovation, we
would like to propose different directions for future research.
In a nutshell, we call for much more research that takes the interdisciplinary
nature of creativity into consideration. This goes beyond cross-disciplinary re-
search questions and methodological approaches, but includes also new research
team setups and collaborations. Academics must accept the challenge of bringing
creativity research from a specific and fragmented field into a much broader,
international domain of expertise. This requires openness and curiosity from all
involved parties to accept even very different views on the same phenomenon. For
this, editors and publishers of journals, books and conferences are also obliged to
be more open for interdisciplinary formats of publications and presentations,
taking other academic fields into consideration for a joint increase of under-
standing and scientific progress.
There is a high potential in the mentioned key areas of creativity, which are
focused on conceptualization, magnitude, operationalization, and enhancement of
creativity. In the following, we will outline in more detail which concrete research
avenues we suggest in this context.
In terms of conceptualization, different researchers tried to suggest compre-
hensive definitions of creativity, especially in their respective fields. However, a
commonly accepted one, which is also coherent with the term innovation, is
missing so far. To result in a consolidation of academic fields, it must also go
beyond disciplinary boundaries considering number and nature of proposed
dimensions, and their structure and relationship between them. Moreover, we
would like to propose that the ultimate test for the robustness of the different
definitions and conceptualizations of creativity would be to demonstrate that dif-
ferent combinations of the suggested dimensions lead to important differences in
observed outcomes. Hence, we are suggesting that the ultimate test is one of
predictive validity of the suggested dimensions. For example, if a product, in the

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A. Brem, R. Puente-Diaz & M. Agogué

technology sector, has high levels of usefulness but low levels of novelty, then one
might hypothesize that this product would have short-term success because it might be
harder to obtain meaningful differentiation in the long run with low levels of novelty. If
we are able to test for this in future research, then we might feel more confident about
the need to measure each of the agreed dimensions of creativity because they lead to
relevant differences in important outcomes such as sales, growth, market share,
technology renewal, top of mind, and brand equity, among others.
Similarly, researchers would need to validate the predictive validity of their
measurement tools. Hence, one possible avenue for future research might involve
assessing if the different dimensions of creativity measured by the rating scales
lead to different outcomes. If we believe that it is important to differentiate novelty
from usefulness, then we should be able to predict that a product with high
novelty and usefulness might have more market success than a product with low
novelty and high usefulness or vice versa. This could represent the “golden” test
for the importance of having different dimensions matched with their respective
operationalization of the constructs. In this context, we also call for more creativity
in studying creativity itself, hence going beyond rating scales and questionnaires.
Research in the different domains could offer fresh stances on methodological
approaches, especially in the combination of ones that are already established in
certain disciplines. For instance, self-reports can be enhanced with supervisor,
employee or peer reporting, whereas experimental approaches would gain in re-
lying more on third-parties observation and the use of questionnaires. To do so, it
is possible that new types of data may provide opportunities to develop such novel
methodological approaches to creativity. Typically, the evolving domain of
crowdsourcing might be seen as a new playground for gathering and evaluating
creative ideas.
In terms of impacting creative performance, we acknowledge that theoretical
integration is required for crafting a more robust conceptualization of creativity
management by bridging three different levels of variables that may foster crea-
tivity: environmental factors (such as a creative climate), individual factors (such
as cognitive style or personality traits) and procedural factors (such as tools to
support creative ideation). Such integration may give a more actionable perspec-
tive for managers to implement creativity in organizations, by stressing the co-
herence and even synergy required between the type of work environment, the
type of management style and the type of methods in place. Hence, one possible
avenue for future research could be to address the elicitation in each field of
questions brought from the two other perspectives. For instance, what are the tools
and methods that can be deployed to actively build and spread a creative climate?
Finally, we are sure that creativity research will be an even more important field
in the future, especially in the context of innovation and its management.
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 Creativity and Innovation

Introduction to Articles for this Special Issue

In order to address our own call for more international and interdisciplinary re-
search, we are confident that this special issue of the International Journal of
Innovation Management will contribute to such a development.
Following our call for paper, we received 18 full paper submissions from 12
countries. With the help of 22 reviewers through several double-blind review
rounds we could finally accept seven papers for this special issue, which are from
Belgium, Canada, France, Japan, Sweden and Switzerland.
The special issue starts with an article by Xavier Castañer. He examines how
creativity and innovation in organizations are defined, which theories are applied
and which explanatory factors and empirical evidence have been discussed. Based
on that, he discusses the overlap between the definitions of creativity and inno-
vation, to finally present a new definition of organizational creativity and inno-
vation. With this approach, he addresses directly our call for a broader view on
creativity. Hence, we would like to encourage further research in this direction to
stimulate the academic discussion even more.
Zhenzhen Zhao, Damien Renard, Mehdi Elmoukhliss and Christine Balague present
their results with an experimental setup. They compare an idea competition approach
with co-creation platforms and a coopetition model — a combination of competition
and cooperation. Their results indicate that a coopetitive approach generates more
creative ideas than the other two approaches. Based on that, they discuss how a con-
sumer co-creation platform should be designed for better creative results. As such co-
creation platforms are commonly used by companies, this research is highly relevant to
practice, but also for researchers on creativity and innovation.
Virgile Chassagnon, Naciba Haned and Christian Le Bas analyse in their paper
the determinants of organizational creativity methods. They show that the use of
creativity methods is different depending on the type of product, particularly
product versus process and single versus complex product. Their empirical anal-
ysis offers interesting insights into the understanding of the importance of factors
that define the application of creativity methods in a company.
Sophie Hooge, Mathias Bejean and Frederic Arnoux write about the effects of a
creativity-based collaborative method on the radical innovation capabilities of a
firm. Their case study illustrates that three specific results were observable through
the application of these workshops: collective building of a radical innovation
strategy, deployment of a monitoring process and building of an emerging creative
organization. Hence, this research offers exciting insights into group dynamics and
their impact on organizational creativity.
The paper by Christina Öberg focuses on the impact of innovation on creativity
at the example of the advertising sector. Based on the idea of a double meaning of

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A. Brem, R. Puente-Diaz & M. Agogué

creativity as innovativeness and artistic skill, she examines how an adaption of

new technology negatively impacts artistic creativity. Her case studies concentrate
on a company level view which shows that innovation may cause knowledge gaps,
a higher level of formulization, and a more sophisticated division of work. With
this research she addresses the fact that literature is focused to a high level on an
individual level analysis, whereby she takes a company level view.
Cirque du Soleil is the topic of Thierry Gateau and Laurent Simon in their paper on
practices for talent and knowledge development. Based on a bootcamp held at the
Cirque du Soleil, they show that such a format provides a forum for recruitment,
training and exploration practices. Their view on the co-construction of what actors
do, make and learn offers fascinating insights into what they call talent economy.
The last paper of this special issue is from Ken Fujiwara, Kosuke Takemura and
Satoko Suzuki. They analyse the influence of smiles on the creativity of an in-
dividual. They hypothesize that smiles would make avoidance-oriented partici-
pants less creative because of a loss in motivation for novelty seeking. Results
from their experiment show that when others smiled at them, individuals with high
avoidance-orientation show less creativity. These findings will be definitively an
interesting topic also for Western cultures, where smiling has a different impli-
cation than in an Asian context.
So to sum up, we think we can offer very interesting diverse, international and
multi-method based research insights in this special issue. This hopefully
encourages future cross-disciplinary research on creativity and innovation.

Acknowledgments
The editors of this special issue would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Joe Tidd,
for his support and the chance for having this special issue in the International
Journal of Innovation Management. Moreover, we would like to thank our 22
reviewers, who did a great job developing the papers further. Last but not least, we
would like to thank Karimah Samsudin and Rajni Nayanthara Gamage from World
Scientific Publishing.

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