Organizational Creative Capabilities

2Building Openness to Develop Organizational Creative Capability

The rise of digital and online platforms has fostered the emergence of “open organization” (Meige 2017). In line with the open innovation paradigm (Chesbrough 2003), innovation thrives on opening up the boundaries of the organization to partners, customers and users. Beyond the mere openness of the innovation process, the openness of the organization now includes all the relationships that the organization maintains with external actors to create value. This openness makes it possible to outsource production, support or innovation activities, as well as to acquire new ideas and knowledge. Openness is thus a crucial vector of creativity for organizations.

However, opening up calls for challenges. Organizations must manage their organizational boundaries (Pénin and Burger-Helmchen 2012), the degree of openness and associated governance (Felin and Zenger 2014) or even the absorption of what has been acquired outside the organization (Ruiz et al. 2020). While openness may promote organizational creativity, it is not easy to implement and requires the development of an organizational capability. This is built by adopting routines and management systems that promote external ideas, their evaluation and their integration into the organization’s innovation processes.

Further, this chapter aims to bridge the gap between the organization’s capability to open up and its creative capabilities. In the first section, we show ...