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The Companion to Creativity: a synoptic overview
Tudor Rickards, Mark A. Runco and Susan Moger
A companion is literally someone who accompanies you on your journeys. This book is a metaphoric companion to accompany you on your journeys into the realms of creativity. Experienced guides into such journeys have provided the contents.
Each traveler will be on a unique personal journey. It may be part of an examined course of study or it may be for development of creative understanding and potential in your professional life. The companion offers a wide range of information and suggestions in support of your leadership goals whatever they may be.
This edited book was conceived as of primary concern to researchers, teachers, postgraduates, masters and possibly undergraduate students of creativity within the organizational and professional domains seeking authoritative and critical perspectives.
Its contents are planned as short commissioned articles organized thematically rather than in A to Z format. Each chapter by an invited expert offers insights into cutting edge research and relevant implications for creative action
Themes of the Companion
In planning the book, the editors carried out a comprehensive review of contemporary works on creativity. Many of the authors of the chapters in the Companion figured prominently in that review. We were also able to draw on the contents of leading creativity journals. Rickards and Moger (2006) provided a classification framework of themes, which we were able to adapt for the Companion. Runco and Pritzkerâs Encyclopedia of Creativity (1999) offered a comprehensive account of historical and contemporary issues. Other earlier texts to which we are indebted include Sternberg (1999), Glover et al. (1989), Runco and Albert (1980) and Boden (1994).
Each theme provides a focus around which issues of practical and theoretical consequence are explored. Our sequencing of themes has the merit of coherence, although we considered various other possibilities and other labels before reaching the final design decision. Furthermore, readers may conclude with us that some of the chapters could have fitted adequately into themes other than the ones allocated by the editorial choice.
We are particularly pleased with the international perspectives provided by the contributors who demonstrate the global nature of contemporary research into creativity. Their work extends, as suggested by Runco and Pritzker (1999), in domains as diverse as education, design, innovation, economics, problem solving, artificial intelligence, cognition and aesthetics. The chapters offer something of value to a readership in such fields including researchers, teachers, postgraduate, executive masters and possibly undergraduate students of creativity.
Theme 1: Creativity and design
Colin M. Fisher and Teresa AmabileââCreativity, improvisation and organizationsâ
Colin Fisher and Teresa Amabile suggest that there is a standard or dominant perspective, which presents organizational creativity as a series of bounded stages. The chapter offers improvisational processes as occurring in a way that cannot be confined within specific components of a linear characterization. Acts of organizational creativity (in common with acts of artistic or scientific creativity) are executed according to plan. However, expertise will have been acquired and skills developed through relevant experiences, which serve as prior rehearsals to acts of improvisation.
Richard CoyneââCreativity and sound: the agony of the sensesâ
Richard Coyne examines how creativity in design is mediated by the relationship between the senses, and the nature of engagement with the sensory experience. He helps position creativity as situated cognition. While vision and creativity are easily associated, creativity and sound are less so. He notes a Lacanian breach through which voice is denied, unless the creator/designer is able to reclaim it as embodied creativity.
Margaret BruceââUnleashing the creative potential of design in businessâ
Margaret Bruce presents design as the purposive application of creativity throughout the process, which results in organizational innovation and competitiveness. She offers illustrative examples of organizations, which compete through design creativity. She illustrates how Fisher and Amabileâs improvisation model matches the process of design creativity as well.
Ilfryn PriceââSpace to adapt: workplaces, creative behaviour and organizational memeticsâ
Ilfryn Price picks up the theme of situated creativity, and the significance of space or place, taking an evolutionary perspective. He notes the significance of language as a symbol system (cf. Coyneâs treatment of sound and voice). Here, the focus is on the non-transparent nature of space within processes of creativity and design.
Theme 2: Environmental influences
Andrew CoxââCreating or destroying business value: understanding the opportunities and the limits of winâwin collaborationâ
Creativity has been frequently associated with synergy or integration of divergent perspectives through association, or bisociation. Winâwin resolution of individual differences has attractive rhetorical possibilities. Andrew Cox shows that collaboration can create value, but can also destroy it according to context.
Gordon Foxall and Victoria JamesââThe style/involvement model of consumer innovationâ
Foxall and James examine an important issue in consumer research regarding consumer innovativeness. They offer a clarification of terminology regarding innovativeness. They report a series of studies demonstrating that consumersâ innovation orientation will be situationally influenced.
Paul JeffcuttââCreativity in the creative industriesâ
Paul Jeffcutt maintains that to understand creativity in the so-called creative industries, a key research challenge will be to overcome existing problems in the availability and sharing of detailed research knowledge on particular cultural economies and establish a generic framework for knowledge building
Stanley S. GryskiewiczââPositive turbulenceâ
Stan Gyskiewicz confronts the increasingly significant environment of uncontrollable turbulence. His contribution is to examine the environment for means of responding effectively (positively) to such environments as a means of organizational renewal.
Theme 3: Innovation and entrepreneurship
Three chapters connect this theme to issues central to creativity.
Colin MartindaleââEvolutionary models of innovation and creativityâ
Colin Martindale reviews evolutionary models of innovation and creativity, revealing pre-Darwinian and non-Darwinian origins. He warns against simplistic metaphoric treatments of creativity, such as random variation within idea search and selection, or environmental adaptation.
Matthew ManimalaââCreativity and entrepreneurshipâ
Matthew Manimala focuses on the creativity of entrepreneurs. Drawing on empirical and conceptual evidence, he proposes a framework for exploring the process through which entrepreneurs generate and gain acceptance for their ideas in their search for competitive advantage.
Arent GreveââSocial networks and creativityâ
Arent Greve offers case evidence of complex technological innovations in support of a multilevel analysis to understand how individual entrepreneurial efforts interact within networks of organizations and industries. Entrepreneurs are advised to understand the importance of building and maintaining social networks.
Theme 4: Knowledge management
Geir Kaufmann and Mark A. RuncoââKnowledge management and the management of creativityâ
Kaufman and Runco take on the challenge of exploring the role of creativity in knowledge management. They argue that learning, retention, thinking and creativity are âin the same loopâ and should not be regarded as separate, distinct and encapsulated processes.
Haridimos TsoukasââCreating organizational knowledge dialogically: an outline of a theoryâ
Haridimos Tsoukas argues that an individual gains knowledge from the exercise of judgement involving dialogical relationships with real and imagined others and with artifacts. His contribution also adds to the theme of design creativity by drawing on the work of Donald Schön (1983).
Theme 5: Meta-theories of creativity
Margaret BodenââComputers and creativity: models and applicationsâ
Margaret Boden provides a concise account of important themes in her extensive studies of computers and creativity. She shows how some of the ambiguities in creativity literature have arisen, and how they might be clarified. Her focus is on psychological (C) creativity, which she believes can be better understood through artificial intelligence studies.
Subrata Chakrabarty and Richard W. WoodmanââRelationship creativity at multiple levelsâ
Chakrabarty and Woodman develop the well-known multi-level of creativity proposed in Woodman et al. (1993). In this chapter, the authors provide a framework of relationships at team, organization and sectoral levels, illustrating the significance of individual and collective creative actions.
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