The Need To Be Creative And Efficient - Case Study Example

Running Head: INNOVATION, TECHNOLOGY AND MARKET Innovation, Technology And Market of How Can Firms Manage The Tension Between The Need To Be Creative And Efficient Over the last two decades, creativity has become widely acknowledged as both a major goal of economic activity and one of the most important instruments through which firms and countries gain and sustain competitive advantage in globally competitive marketplaces. In order to find out the ways firms manage the tension between the need to be creative and efficient, one has to study in detail all the related concepts and situations from the real world. A close connection is usually made between science and creativity as a foundation of competitive advantage, for instance, when "Science and Technology" are recognised as a cause of economic progress and a reason for the acquisition of firms in the "new" knowledge society. At the firm's level, Roth claims that creativity is a key functional activity in firms, in much the same way as marketing or finance are. Product creativity is then thought of as a routine operation like any other that firms perform. Others propose (Tang, 1998) that creativity is a key endurance strategy for firms for the reason that it facilitates more rapid alteration to inefficient environments. Creativity then becomes a primary indicator of a firm's ability to adapt to its environment (Drucker, 1994). Over the past few decades, this acclamation of creativity has become highly prominent as technological and scientific advancement, particularly in information and communication, increasingly affects every aspect of people's lives. Creativity has apparent plus points for individuals and society all together. Not astoundingly, a great pact of research has focused on creativity, particularly in the last two decades. This thesis appraises the creativity explore, first looking to the related qualities, aptitudes, influences, and products, and then inside disciplinary standpoints on creativity (e.g., natal, emotional, developmental, organisational). Great progress is being completed in creativity research, but more discussion between points of views is recommended. Novel and imperative areas of research are underlined, and a range of benefits of creativity is conversed. Acronyms Terms Originality and innovation are deemed to be key factors for attaining the sustained organisational viable advantage in the new economy. Therefore, organisations require continuously accepting, building up, generating and innovating. President Bush (2002) thinks that the potency of the US economy is put up on the creativity and entrepreneurship of the public. Since it is opposed that employees' creativity makes an essential contribution to organisational innovation, efficacy and continued existence, there is a need for organisations to create the organisational backgrounds that are most helpful to idea formation and creative opinion. In other terms, for employees to be innovative there must be a work atmosphere that favours the process of ingenuity. Accordingly, examiners and practitioners have become more and more attentive in learning the environmental causes that comprises communal, emotional, rational development and work situations, favourable to creativity. Hypothesis and research advocate that when the employees have a mutual commitment to their assignments and when they are given sufficient resources to carry out their work, the workers will be automatically turn out to be creative. Other sections of research discovered that employees would be creative when their task is intellectually exigent; and when they are given a high degree of independence and control over their personal effort. In addition, the literature discloses that organisational support and appraisal of ideas are required so as to encourage creativity and that honours and additional benefits are obligatory to encourage creativity and promote the creative work setting (Jassawalla & Sashittal, 2000). Conversely, when one moves away from discussing creativity at a highly abstract, macro level and turns to the literature for advice on how to be innovative in one's own firm, one finds a variety of prescriptions. These prescriptions are derived from perspectives in which creativity may be seen variously as: a characteristic of firms called innovativeness (Bates, 1995); an economic process of applying and spreading scientific advances (Subramanian, 1996); a marketing process of addressing unsatisfied needs (Johne, 1999); a strategic dimension of competition in high technology industries (Damanpour, 2001); a routine function of firms (Drucker, 1994); a cause of economic development through cumulative (self-reinforcing) complex interactions (Calantone, 2002); or a determinant of industrial structures and barriers to entrance (Denton, 1999). Others also take this position: The term "creativity" makes most individuals think first about technology this is unfortunate, for our rising world requires more social and firm's creativity Certainly, it is by now a virtual platitude that if technical creativity runs far ahead of harmonising social and firm's creativity, its use in practice can be either dysfunctional or negligible. (Subramanian, 1996: pp 13-14) People in firms often talk about creativity as if there was some ultimate novelty, one that would finally deliver them from the pressures of competition, if only they could make the right rational choice. But as they all do this, they become trapped in the paradox described above, to which there is no resolution. The neoclassical understanding of creativity, therefore, represents a "bothand" way of thinking. At one level, that of whole economies and markets, creativity is understood as a variable in the economic laws, a form of Natural Law Teleology, which produces efficient outcomes and sustains equilibrium states. At another level, that of the industry, creativity is understood as a choice that firms make on rational grounds in order to secure temporary monopoly positions and so maximise their profit goals. This is Rationalist Teleology, which is also applied at the level of the individual manager. It is autonomous rational individuals who select creativities on the basis of rational predictions and calculations in order to maximise their organisation's profits. Two different ways of thinking are thus employed, sometimes one and sometimes the other, depending upon the level of analysis. In one way of thinking creativity is understood as a variable in a deterministic market system driven by the equivalent of natural laws; in the other way of thinking it is thought of as a variable, the consequences of which rational managers can predict and hence choose to control. In this "both and" thinking any sense of the paradox of determinism and choice is simply eliminated. A very different way of thinking about creativity is to be found in what has come to be called evolutionary economics, most notably in the work of Tidd (1997). He was interested in explaining why economic growth occurs, rather than simply ascribing it to an unexplained residual; his main contribution was to place creativity inside the economic system rather than considering it as an exogenous shock to which economic systems reacted. He argued that an economy could not be understood as an entity independent of society as a whole and that economic growth had to be explained in terms of the dynamics of scientific and technological creativity and the roles of entrepreneurs in firms. For him, creativity was to be understood in terms of both social/organisational dynamics and individual psychology. Tidd distinguished between the entrepreneur who performed a role, and creativity, which was the outcome of entrepreneurial activity in firms that possessed characteristics making it possible for individuals to take the role of entrepreneur. For him, the "entrepreneur" played a central role in the process of economic development. Several people could take this role and none would play it all the time. He therefore thought about economic growth in terms of dynamic processes, rather than in terms of the mechanisms that featured in neoclassical economics. Furthermore, Tidd addressed the issue of creativity within a systemic framework. The creativity could thus be a new output that the organisation placed in its environment; a new input it received from the environment, or a new way of arranging its internal relations, including the psychological attributes of individuals. A number of writers have pointed to the limitations of thinking about the creativity process as one of rational design and they argue for a perspective that harks back to Tidd's work. For instance, population ecology theorists (Hannan and Freeman, 1977) claim that rules of competition are not set by an individual organisation but are established in the adaptive interaction between firms within the wider population of firms. On the other hand, even though Tidd's (1997) work has not entered mainstream thinking in a straightforward way, it has nevertheless had a significant impact. A number of writers have picked up on his suggestion that creativity starts with the creation of scientific knowledge. They have argued that advancements in science, translated by technological institutions into technical, instrumental knowledge, are passed on to firms possessing the Research and Development (R&D) resources required to translate such new knowledge into products, and marketing departments to position those products in the market. Firms, therefore, are conceived of as the agents of creativity: institutions that mediate the transformation of scientific knowledge into concrete material realities with wide social use (Damanpour, 2001). Here, the focus shifts from the single variable explanations of neoclassical economics, explored in terms of econometric identification of correlations between R&D expenditure and economic performance, to more idiosyncratic agency models. These models take account of how cultural variables, biased decision-making strategies and managerial procedures mediate processes of transferring, adding value to and utilising the new knowledge flowing between the institutions of science and industrial firms. Creative thoughts are the basis of all innovations. In the context of this study, the word "creativity" is classified as the conception of ideas, and innovation is the execution of these conceptions (Amabile et al., 1996). Thus, here employee's creativity is regarded as to be the generation of notions, creations or events that are: new or innovative and prospectively valuable to the organisation. Most of the research on creativity often finishes in the explanation of individual distinctiveness of the creative being, such as forthrightness to new practices, less conservative and hard-working, more self-possessed, self-accepting, determined, prevailing, argumentative and precipitate (Arbuckle, 2003). Examiners advocate that individuals with creative qualities show higher creative talent than those with less creative character. The importance of very high astuteness, nevertheless, is still disputed as the most important trait of the creative being (Sternberg, 1999). Other researchers underline inspirational and social aspects as the powerful forces at the back of creativity. Collins and Amabile (1999) argue that people who love their works also turn out to be creative if they have knowledge and talents in the field and a certain level of openness in view. In their analysis on creativity, Williams and Young (1999) accomplished that common factors enhance originality in the work places. Specifically, survey in social psychology recommends that encouraging behaviour on the part of others in the organisation (e.g. colleagues and overseers) augment employees' inventiveness (Amabile et al., 1996; Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Tierney et al., 1999). In addition, the employees' creativity is influenced by the supportive deeds of others outside the organisation (Koestmer et al., 1999). Weiss (2002) shows that personnel who are greatly creative as adults naturally received, as kids, act of kindness from their blood relations. Concerning supportive behaviour, the literature also puts forward that support from functional and non- functional sources forms employee's frame of mind that, in turn, have an effect on employee's originality. Notional work also advocates that when employees experience constructive dispositions, their cognitive or poignant processes are improved such that they show evidence of better levels of creativity (Isen, 1999). According to the researches it has been revealed that the factors that could slow down creativity between individuals include inner political dilemmas, conservatism and fixed prescribed structures. In a recent study, Handzic and Chaimungkalanont (2003) discovered that unofficial socialisation had a stronger encouraging effect on creativity than controlled communalisation (that is based on a fixed reserved structure). These discoveries entail that alterations in organisational structure (for instance, from classical structure to more horizontal structures) build an upbeat situation for creativity because of the better contact between teammates. From the creativity study illustrated above, it is vital to comprehend that the story of creativity has many directions with no genuine conclusions. The creative investigative literature advocates that the creative behaviour of teams is improved by leadership intercessions. The review has specified that a management responsibility of a facilitative kind promote the generation of new (creative) end products (Shelley and Perry-Smoth, 2000; Rickards, 2000; Politis, 2001). Therefore, there must be a dynamic interaction between headship and inventiveness in sustaining, persuading and strengthening the insights and the performances of employees that manipulate the innovative work setting. The efficiency of any organisation matters a lot for the eminence of life, for the economy of the nation as well as for enlarging rivalry among the organisations in the unstable global economy. In the last 20 years, the notion of evaluating efficiency has gained remarkable scientific interest (Cohen and Bailey, 1997). Using organisational efficiency, various types of organisational frameworks, management styles, training methodology, practices regarding manufacturing, several hypotheses of incentives and role of individuals or a group in the development of an organisation and innumerable other social aspects are appraised. It is quite difficult to identify the key factors that can be used to measure an organisation's efficiency because there are a number of approaches that can be employed for judging the efficiency. However, creativity and productivity fit into the frame of evaluating the efficiency and act as measuring the respondents' insight of the work efficiency being fulfilled in their teams. The abstract framework suggests that the encouragement scales of the inventive work atmosphere will be absolutely concerned about creativity and productivity, whereas the impediment scales will be pessimistically related. Creativity and productivity are optimistically related with encouragement scale but pessimistically related with impediment scale of the inventive work environment. References Amabile, T.M. (1996), Creativity in Context, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Arbuckle, J.L. (2003), Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS), User's Guide Version 5.0, Small Waters Corporation, Chicago, IL. Bush, G.W. 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(1999), "Successful market innovation", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 2 No.1, pp.6-11. Roth, N., Prieto, J., Dvir, R., Evans, S. (2000), "An integrated framework for new-use and innovation management and measurement", Proceedings of Performance Measurement 2000 Conference, Cambridge. Subramanian, A., Nilakanta, S. (1996), "Organisational innovativeness: exploring the relationship between organisational determinants of innovation, types of innovations, and measures of organisational performance", Omega, Vol. 24 No.6, pp.631-47. Tang, H.K. (1998), "An integrative model of innovation in organisations", Technovation, Vol. 18 No.5, pp.297-309. Tidd, J, Bessant, J, Pavitt, K (1997), Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organisational Change, John Wiley and Sons, NY. Read More