Management of Extreme Situations

18A Knowledge Corpus and Innovation

18.1. Creativity is not only based on imagination

In their most general form, classical creative methods (of which the archetype is brainstorming) are based on a principle of “divergence-convergence”. They include a divergent thinking phase (moving away from the problem at hand, using subjectivity, analogy, imagination, to better come back to it from another angle) and a convergent thinking phase (transforming ideas into solutions that meet innovation objectives). These methods aim to produce as many ideas as possible in a short period of time, stimulating the imagination. In this area, there is a plethora of classic positive statements (see, for example, Louafa and Ferret 2008).

Despite their popularity, these methods have a number of disadvantages.

First, they are essentially problem-solving methods: they are solution-oriented and not idea-generation-oriented, which sometimes makes them unsuitable for general innovation processes. In an industrial context, innovation activities in the technical field are schematically based on two dynamics (see Box 18.1):

• – the confrontation with a problem (reduced at a given moment to a technical dimension) leading to an innovative solution. It is a process of innovation in a closed environment: the problem to be solved;
• – the idea having found a market. It is a process of innovation in an open framework.

Box 18.1. The two types of innovation dynamics in an industrial company

In a), the framework ...