Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

Sources and Suggested Further Reading

Prologue: When Strategy Meets Creativity

Chapter 1: False Separations and Creative Connections

Our discussion of creativity as a paradoxical process derives from Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation. However, seeing such a duality at the heart of creation can be traced back to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (where he explores and makes the case for the co-existence of Apollonian and Dionysian forces), subsequently back to ancient mythology and most culture's pre-historical creation myths.

The core of Koestler's definition of creativity is bisociation, a surprising connection between two habitually disconnected frames of reference. For a further discussion of Koestler's concept of bisociation and its relation to other fields and disciplines, see Mark Turner's edited collection The Artful Mind (2006).

We began to explore the false opposition between ‘creatives’ and ‘executives’, in the light of the need for bisociation on both fronts, in works such as the book Images of Strategy (Cummings and Wilson, 2003 – in particular in the chapter ‘Strategy as Creativity’ by Bilton, Cummings and Wilson) and the book Management and Creativity (Bilton, 2007).

For a critique of the business rhetoric of ‘creativity’ in academic literature, see Craig Prichard's 2002 article, ‘Creative Selves? Critically Reading “Creativity” in Management Discourse’. Thomas Frank (1997), Jim McGuigan (2009) and Philip Schlesinger (2007), all present further examples of the ...