Exploring the Dynamic Transition of Creativity into Innovation

Organisations are compelled more than ever to innovate for strategic advantage, value-creation and change. Abundant research over recent decades has centered on two key aspects of innovation: the creativity of individuals, groups, and organisations; and management of the innovation process that uses creativity to conceive change. In this sense, creativity has evolved into a structure of deliberate practices aimed at problem-solving and generative capacity. Innovating has similarly evolved into specific management practices that organise and provision the process towards intended outcomes. But research into micro-level creativity and macro-level innovation has tended to advance independently along disciplinary lines. Differing approaches span disparate levels and domains making it difficult to understand their interconnection as a systemic whole. A holistic understanding of how creative ideas transition into innovation outcomes would be valuable knowledge for optimal success, yet how it occurs remains underexplained in the literature, and must be explored. Building on these circumstances, this qualitative study looks beyond disciplinary divides and finds consistent emphasis on social dimensions across extant theories relevant to creativity and innovation, yet none explain the dynamic role social dimensions may play in the process. Prioritizing praxis over product, this study argues that socialization of ideas has become central to modern innovation practice due largely to recent evolutions in the innovation environment such as multidiscipline collaboration, decentralised work groups, and open innovation, and that its influence is radically underestimated. The proposition is made that social interaction is a causal mechanism of transition and a key determinant in how ideas emerge and evolve into innovations within organisational contexts. Study findings are drawn from interviews with senior Australian innovators across diverse sectors, whose roles represent two orientations to the shared goal of innovating, characterised as creative and organising. A mixed technique approach guided by constructivist grounded theory method analyses how these characterisations influenced actual innovation outcomes. Evidence of the interactions between innovation managers and creative proponents demonstrates how innovation performance and outcomes are either hindered or advanced. It also shows communication-of-novelty to be an undervalued means of cultivating organisational knowledge. Data is synthesized with literature on communication, organisational knowledge, empathy, trust, and tacit knowledge, for example, to generate the constructs of social interaction, generative and organising capacities within a novel perspective of innovation ecology resulting in a substantive theory. The study concludes with possible practice interventions to advance innovation practices and identifies specific topics for further research.<p></p>