Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

What’s Involved in Innovation?

Some people believe that creativity is inborn; others believe that with training, anyone can be creative. The latter group views creativity as a fourfold process.40

1. Perception involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things from a unique perspective. One person may see solutions to a problem that others cannot or will not see at all. The movement from perception to reality, however, doesn’t occur instantaneously.

2. Instead, ideas go through a process of incubation. Sometimes employees need to sit on their ideas, which doesn’t mean sitting and doing nothing. Rather, during this incubation period, employees should collect massive amounts of data that are stored, retrieved, studied, reshaped, and ...