Seventeen years ago Tudor Rickards and Susan Moger of the Manchester Business School launched an ambitious project – the introduction of a new academic journal in the field of creativity studies. But this would be no stodgy academic journal strictly dedicated to theory and research, rather, given the applied nature of creativity, this journal would focus on the relevance and applicability of creativity to innovation and organizational practices. This journal is called Creativity and Innovation Management (CIM). Not being satisfied with increases in paper submissions, citations to papers published in the CIM, and manuscript rejection rates, all evidence of the success of this journal, the new team of editors decided to hold a community meeting in Oxford, England, in the spring of 2005. The explicit intent of this two-day meeting was to begin to build a community of scholars who were interested in creativity and innovation management, a rare goal for academic journals. Building on the positive momentum of the first community meeting, the editors decided to hold a second meeting. The purpose of this brief report is to provide a summary of the Second Creativity and Innovation Management Community Meeting held at Buffalo State College, and co-hosted with the faculty of the International Center for Studies in Creativity, from 28 to 30 May 2008. The expressed aim of the CIM journal is to ‘bridge the gap between theory and practice of organizing imagination and innovation’. The journal focuses on facilitating creative potential that can be transformed into innovative business development. With these aims in mind it was decided to design the programme and framework of the second community meeting around a theme that reflected the journal's concern for both theory and practice. The theme selected for the meeting was ‘Integrating Inquiry and Action’. This theme fostered an explicit goal for the meeting, namely to facilitate an exchange between scholars and practitioners. The entire approach to the meeting was influenced by the adoption of the ‘Integrating Inquiry and Action’ theme. For instance, keynote speakers were invited from both academe and industry and the call for papers sought presentations based on research as well as practice. The backbone to the conference programme was a set of six invited keynote speeches. Professor Tudor Rickards of the Manchester Business School conducted the first keynote speech, delivered during the opening banquet. In his speech, Professor Rickards explored past attempts to understand creativity, current models, theories and programmes, and finally, future issues and considerations. Five keynote speeches were delivered over the course of the two full conference days. Again, these invited speakers represented both universities and businesses. There were three scholarly thought leaders: Ming-Huei Chen of the Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, Todd Lubart from the University in Paris, and Michael Mumford of the University of Oklahoma. Reviewing these speeches in order of the conference programme, Professor Lubart's keynote address explored creativity across cultures. In his speech Professor Lubart eloquently described three crucial ways in which culture shapes creativity: (1) the domain of creativity (i.e., where you find creativity); (2) the nature of creativity (i.e., the kind of creativity); and (3) the amount of creativity (i.e., the degree to which culture nurtures individual creativity). Dr Ming-Huei Chen described approaches to creativity and innovation in Eastern cultures. This speech specifically examined the important role social networks play in facilitating creative thinking among members of project teams. Professor Michael Mumford delivered the final academic keynote speech. In this keynote address, Professor Mumford examined the role leadership plays in bringing about creativity and innovation in organizations. According to Mumford, some of the most crucial actions leaders can take include: defining a viable mission, developing the organization's absorptive capacity, bringing the right people together, and ensuring efficient planning and implementation. The two invited business leaders were Dr Casimer DeCusatis, a Distinguished Engineer from the IBM Corporation, and Miriam Kelley, the Vice President for Design from Fisher-Price Toys. Dr DeCusatis reported on an innovation study conducted within IBM and in particular highlighted distinctions among different innovation teams. His paper appears in the June issue of this year's CIM journal. Miriam Kelley's speech examined the many strategies Fisher-Price Toys has adopted to facilitate fresh ideas and innovation, such as benchmarking organizations outside of the toy industry, creating an executive position focused strictly on innovation, and introducing deliberate creative processes. Stimulation and dialogue were further advanced by 35 concurrent session presentations. The number of sessions makes it impossible to review and describe each session. The papers were organized into themes with two paper presentations per session. Some of the themes were as follows: Creativity and mediation, Creativity in organizations, Current and ongoing developments in creative problem solving, Developing creativity assessment tools, Applications of creative problem solving, Climate and environment, Styles of creativity, and Definitions of innovation. To ensure an exchange between the speakers and the audience, graduate students and alumni of Buffalo State College moderated each concurrent session. All concurrent session papers appear in the conference proceedings. Additionally, several keynote speakers provided papers that appear in the proceedings, including the opening keynote speech by Professor Rickards. The best academic papers will be published in a special issue of Creativity and Innovation Management in 2009, while the best papers focused on applied work will be nominated for publication in Visions, a magazine published by the Product Development and Management Association. The 2nd CIM Community Meeting brought together 173 academics and practitioners from 18 different countries. Discussions were lively, exchanges were energetic, keynote sessions were stimulating and the conference goal of fostering an exchange between theory and practice was achieved. Participants' reaction to the conference, as assessed through a post-conference survey, was extremely positive. Building on the positive energy created during the 2nd Community Meeting, a third meeting is now being planned for July 2010 in Paris, France. Professor Todd Lubart will be taking the lead in organizing the 2010 CIM conference.
This article explores the extent of influence of culture on implicit theories of creativity among laypeople from the United States and Singapore, as well as the ethnic groups in Singapore. Adaptive and innovative styles of creativity were examined, as well as their own conceptions of creativity. Laypersons from the United States and Singapore were asked to rate the creativity level for the descriptors of the adaptor and innovator explicit theory of creativity. The laypersons were also asked to give words they believed associated with creativity. Data indicated that there was an implicit belief that high creativity was associated with the innovative style of creativity. Further, the words that were associated with creativity seemed to have an innovator bias.
A major focus within the field of creativity has been on the development of methodologies aimed at deliberately nurturing creative thinking. These methodologies have attempted to mirror the creative process in ways that allow individuals and groups to explicitly call on and employ their creative faculties. In an attempt to uplift employees' creative capabilities many of these methodologies have been introduced into organizations through training programs, as well as through application to business challenges. Do these methods work? What is the empirical evidence that these deliberate creative process methods enhance employees' creativity? Though there are a handful of creative process methods, few have married the concern for application with an interest in demonstrating the benefits of these applied efforts through systematic research. Creative Problem Solving (CPS), one of the more popular creative process models, has been one of the rare exceptions. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the research literature that reports on the impact of CPS training carried out within organizational contexts, that is training programs that involved professionals or students working on real business challenges. Additionally, the positive benefits of CPS are further examined through reports that cite the outcomes of applying CPS to business challenges. In a field replete with methods that have been commercialized, it is imperative to strike a balance between research and practice as an imbalance towards practice may foster a field dominated by individuals who offer untested products and services.
Abstract Puccio, Treffinger, and Talbot's 1995 paper examined relationships between creativity style and characteristics of employees' products. Using the same data, the present investigation tested a quite different question. Specifically, this investigation explicitly tested a person‐environment fit model for predicting employees' level of creative productivity. A modified version of Kirton's Adaptor‐Innovator Inventory was used to operationalize the personenvironment fit model and a self‐report measure, based on Bese‐mer's work, was used to assess creative productivity. Multiple regression analysis yielded main effects across all three subtraits associated with Kirton's creativity style measure. Significant interaction effects were found for the efficiency subtrait and two of the subscales from the product measure. The interaction effects indicated that style match between the individual and the environment was associated with higher levels of product novelty and resolution. Greater negative effects of a style mismatch were found for those with an innovative preference. The implications of these results and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Kirton has asserted that his measure of creative style, Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory, is discrete or orthogonal to level measures of creativity. This study used a well-established measure, the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, on a relatively larger sample than in previous studies. Scores for 132 (40 men, 92 women) college students on Kirton's measure were significantly correlated with scores on Torrance's Fluency, Flexibility, and Originality subtests. Further, t tests showed a significant difference between the extreme adaptor and innovator groups for fluency.
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