Organizational Creative Capabilities

6Idea Management and Idea Socialization in Organizations

Having ideas and being capable of using them are central for organizations, economists and management researchers. Concerning sources of value and renewal, scholars in economic and management sciences state that ideas become the driving force behind organizational growth and resilience (Phelps 2013; Cohendet et al. 2017). However, despite this commonly adopted statement, the notion of ideas holds only a modest role in the management science literature. Thus, idea management has recently emerged as a discipline. This can be explained by the fact that the literature has tended, for a very long time, to represent the generation of ideas by a creator or a small informal group of individuals, as a particular moment (a “spark” or a “moment of grace”) that plays a marginal role at the beginning of an innovation project.

However, in recent years, the literature has begun to delve deeper into the notion of the idea (Harvey et al. 2013; Cohendet et al. 2017; Perry-Smith and Mannucci 2017). Garud et al. (2013) were the first to put ideas back at the center of innovation processes by considering them to cover the phases of invention (the emergence of an idea), development (the elaboration of the idea) and implementation (the widespread acceptance of the idea). Perry-Smith and Mannucci (2017) also argued that a new idea should not be confined at a particular time or attributed to a particular individual, but rather should be interpreted ...