Promoting Creativity at Work – Implications for Scientific Creativity

Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas. Organizations, including universities and other research institutions, need to develop novel and useful products to satisfy constantly evolving customer needs. Furthermore, organizational procedures and processes develop over time, and continuous improvements in processes contribute to organizational efficiency. Thus, the development of novel and useful ideas in relation to products, procedures and services is mandated from many employees in modern organizations, including researchers and scientists. This creativity can take on many different forms, for example unconventional solutions to a wide variety of problems related to research, teaching and administration. Because many of these problems are comparable to that of workers in all kinds of jobs, I believe it is possible to draw on the rich knowledge in the field of organizational creativity to provide some insights into how to foster scientific creativity. The work of researchers and scientists is in many ways comparable to that of knowledge workers in other kinds of organizations: they are high-level employees who apply knowledge to do their work, oftentimes using creative thinking. A rich body of literature has dealt with creativity in these jobs where creativity is a core requirement, and has examined the organizational factors related to creativity. Before I summarize this research and highlight some important research findings concerning the rewards for creativity, the design of jobs, the processes leading to creativity, the organizational climate, and daily work events associated with creativity, I will disentangle different forms of creativity at work and describe a general model of creativity in the context of work.