Organizational Creative Capabilities

Introduction

In the last decade, business leaders have realized that creativity has become a major challenge in the organizations who seek to make profound changes within, in order to achieve their strategic goals (IBM CEO study 2010¹). Just as in the economic field, Nobel laureate in economics Edmund Strother Phelps argues that modern economic growth is a direct result of human initiative and creativity (Phelps 2013). Creativity has thus become an issue for the development of organizations and society in a globalized world, in which ideas and people circulate rapidly, technological change is extremely rapid, competition is increasingly exacerbated, and environmental issues are becoming increasingly prevalent (Parmentier et al. 2017). Thus, organizations must find and implement creative ideas to survive this era; they must constantly reinvent themselves.

After a long history of being confined to the fields of art or great inventions and being the prerogative of exceptional individuals (Kris 1952), creativity is now perceived as a fundamental human capacity (Lubart 2003). Progressively, during the 20th century, work on the processes, methods and cognitive foundations of creativity made it possible to understand how this capacity is activated and developed in the individual. The term creativity itself is a recent one, appearing in the latter part of the 20th century in the work of Baron, “in the narrow sense, creativity refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of ...