Organizational Creative Capabilities

7Measuring Organizational Creative Capabilities

In a recent article, Dutraive and Szostak (2021) referred to the creative economy paradigm to describe the new economic regime of growth, employment and innovation in today’s organizations, which is increasingly based on creativity, culture and technology. In this regime, characterized by rapid technological change and a much more unstable environment, creativity and new ideas play a central role in the success of organizations. The mastery of skills and organizational capabilities to stimulate, enrich, select and retain creative ideas is strategic and essential for organizations (Parmentier et al. 2017). Organizations are thus led to develop creative capabilities, i.e. a set of organizational routines in order to achieve creative results.

Managing these creative capabilities is a strategic activity, and as Drucker (2001) writes, we cannot manage what we do not measure. We therefore aim, based on this work, to build a scale for measuring organizational creative capability (OCC), because measuring OCC contributes to building (1) an internal tool, as well as (2) a best practice guide for creative organizations to assess and strengthen their creative capability. An OCC scale will also allow us to follow, in a longitudinal perspective, the evolution of the creative capability of different companies (French and international), and the diagnosis of potential sources of difficulties in creative production. In this chapter, we present ...