Experiential Exercises

Using Your Creativity and Innovation

Creativity and innovation are important for organizational success. NBC has contacted your group for help with creating a new comedy series that will consist of five-minute episodes that NBC will broadcast on its website. NBC’s executives want this comedy series to appeal to college-aged individuals. To be clear, NBC does not want your group to create this new series—NBC has the employees necessary to handle this project. Instead, NBC’s executives want your group to indicate the most important techniques it can use to foster the creativity and innovation it needs within its company. In your group, create five different recommendations (and provide examples) to help NBC foster creativity within the organization. Be prepared to present these recommendations in class.

You and Your Career

The previous sections have highlighted the importance of creativity to organizational success. As such, organizations will continue to search for creative employees. How would you rate your own creativity? What evidence do you have to support your rating? Think about this is terms of an interview with a potential employer who is searching for creative employees. How would you use examples from your life to demonstrate your creative skills? In addition to helping you obtain a job, your creative skills might help you advance in an organization. If you currently hold a job, how might you demonstrate your creativity to your manager?

Building Your Management Skills Portfolio

Your Management Skills Portfolio is a collection of activities specially designed to demonstrate your management knowledge and skill. Be sure to save your work. Taking your printed portfolio to an employment interview could be helpful in obtaining a job.

The portfolio activity for this appendix is Innovating at Electronic Arts. Study the information and complete the exercises that follow.51

Although creativity and innovation are important for all companies, these factors are the essence of many companies. An example of such a company is Electronic Arts (EA), a company based in Redwood City, California, that develops, produces, markets, and distributes video games such as Tiger Woods PGA Golf, Medal of Honor, and Madden NFL.

EA is currently interested in diversifying its product line to include more video games for younger children. EA’s management team views this age group as a prime market for new video games. Specifically, EA wants you to develop a game that helps preschool through elementary school–aged children improve their math skills. In other words, your mission is to develop a new product idea.

Record your answers as you go through the five steps of the innovation process.

  1. A3.10. Inventing: Describe the main characteristics of your new video game: What will the children do in the new game? How will it help them improve their math skills?

              

              

              

  2. A3.11. Developing: Describe how you can make the new video game serviceable for EA.

              

              

              

  3. A3.12. Diffusing: How would you test the new video game’s utility and worth?

              

              

              

  4. A3.13. Integrating: How would you make the new video game a permanent part of EA?

              

              

              

  5. A3.14. Monitoring: Describe how you would monitor the new video game to determine the extent to which it is helping EA.

              

              

              

    MyManagementLab: Writing Exercises

    If your instructor has assigned this activity, go to mymanagementlab.com for the following assignments:

    Assisted Grading Questions

    1. A3–15. Describe five ways that organizations might increase creativity among their employees.

    2. A3–16. Define total quality management (TQM), and describe the relationship between TQM and innovation.

Endnotes

  1. 1. Challenge Case based on: Leigh Buchanan, “We Will Be the Best-Run Business in America,” Inc., January 24, 2012, http://www.inc.com; MidwayUSA, “About MidwayUSA,” http://www.midwayusa.com, accessed May 24, 2012; “MidwayUSA,” Inside Columbia’s CEO (Fall 2011): 60–61; “Vice President Biden and Commerce Secretary Locke Present Baldrige Award for Innovation,” Quality (February 2011): 9.

  2. 2. For an excellent review of research on creativity, see: Mark Runco, “Creativity,” Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 657–687.

  3. 3. Cameron M. Ford, “Creative Developments in Creativity Theory,” Academy of Management Review 25, no. 2 (April 2000): 284–285. For an interesting study examining creativity in the advertising industry, see: Andrew Von Nordneflycht, “Is Public Ownership Bad for Professional Service Firms? Ad Agency Ownership, Performance, and Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 429–445.

  4. 4. David K. Carson, “The Importance of Creativity in Family Therapy: A Preliminary Consideration,” Family Journal 7, no. 4 (October 1999): 326–334.

  5. 5. Aurora Almendral, “Turning a Million Cubic Yards of Post-Typhoon Trash into Jobs,” Weekend Edition, February 9, 2014, http://www.npr.org; “Yolanda Survivors Hired to Clear Mountains of Waste,” Philippine Star, November 29, 2013, http://www.philstar.com; Pilko and Associates, “Our Global Team: Tim Walsh,” http://www.pilko.com, accessed April 18, 2014.

  6. 6. Jeff Cork, “Bobby Kotick Traces His Roots, Announces Indie Game Competition,” Game Informer, February 18, 2010, http://gameinformer.com.

  7. 7. This section is based on Teresa M. Amabile, “How to Kill Creativity,” Harvard Business Review 76, no. 5 (September–October 1998): 77–89.

  8. 8. Teresa M. Amabile, Constance N. Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer, “Creativity Under the Gun,” Harvard Business Review 80, no. 8 (August 2002): 52–61. See also: Markus Baer and Greg R. Oldham, “The Curvilinear Relation Between Experienced Creative Time Pressure and Creativity: Moderating Effects of Openness to Experience and Support for Creativity,” Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 4 (2006): 963–970.

  9. 9. To better understand how team dynamics influence research and development, see Chen, G., Farh, J., Campbell-Bush, E. M., Wu, Z, & Wu, X., “Teams as innovation systems: Multilevel motivational antecedents of innovation in R&D teams,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 2013, 98: 1018-1027.

  10. 10. To understand how team leaders foster creativity, see Gong, Y., Kim, T., Lee, D., & Zhu, J., “A multilevel model of team goal orientation, information exchange, and creativity,” Academy of Management Journal, 2013, 56: 827-851.

  11. 11. For more information on the cross-level factors that foster creativity, see: Giles Hirst, Daan Van Knippenberg, and Jing Zhou, “A Cross-Level Perspective on Employee Creativity: Goal Orientation, Team Learning Behavior, and Individual Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 52, no. 2 (2009): 280–293.

  12. 12. Jennifer M. George and Jing Zhou, “Dual Tuning in a Supportive Context: Joint Contributions of Positive Mood, Negative Mood, and Supervisory Behaviors to Employee Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): 605–622.

  13. 13. John J. Kao, “The Art & Discipline of Business Creativity,” Strategy & Leadership 25, no. 4 (July/August 1997): 6–11.

  14. 14. Jill E. Perry-Smith, “Social yet Creative: The Role of Social Relationships in Facilitating Individual Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 85–101.

  15. 15. Howard Schlossberg, “Innovation: An Elusive Commodity with Many Definitions,” Marketing News 25, no. 8 (April 15, 1991): 11.

  16. 16. For an interesting discussion of how some organizations use collective intelligence to innovate effectively, see: “A Billion Brains Are Better than One,” MIT Sloan Management Review, March 18, 2010, http://sloanreview.mit.edu.

  17. 17. James M. Higgins, Innovate or Evaporate: Test & Improve Your Organization’s IQ (Winter Park, FL: The New Management Publishing Company, 1995). See also: Shalini Khazanchi, Marianne Lewis, and Kenneth Boyer, “Innovation-Supportive Culture: The Impact of Organizational Values on Process Innovation,” Journal of Operations Management 25, no. 4 (2007): 871–884.

  18. 18. John Kao, Innovation Nation (New York: Free Press, 2007).

  19. 19. These statistics are based on Amazon.com’s search function.

  20. 20. Bob Kijkuit and Jan van den Ende, “With a Little Help from Our Colleagues: A Longitudinal Study of Social Networks for Innovation,” Organization Studies 31, no. 4 (2010): 451–479.

  21. 21. Jena McGregor, “Special Report: 25 Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek (May 14, 2007): 52–60.

  22. 22. L. Kwoh, “You Call That Innovation?” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304791704577418250902309914.html, last updated May 23, 2012.

  23. 23. Chuck Salter, “Most Innovative Companies 2010,” Fast Company, February 17, 2010, http://www.fastcompany.com. For more information on how top executives influence innovation, see Li, Q., Maggitti, P. G., Smith, K. G., Tesluk, P. E., & Katila, R., “Top management attention to innovation: The role of search selection and intensity in new product introductions,” Academy of Management Journal, 2013, 56: 893-916.

  24. 24. “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” http://www.forbes.com/special-features/innovative-companies.html, accessed June 8, 2012.

  25. 25. For more information on the link between creativity and innovation, see: Bob Kijkuit and Jan van den Ende, “The Organizational Life of an Idea: Integrating Social Network, Creativity and Decision-Making Perspectives,” Journal of Management Studies 44, no. 6 (2007): 863–882.

  26. 26. This discussion is based on D. R. Nayak and J. M. Ketteringham, Breakthroughs (New York: Rawson Associates, 1986).

  27. 27. James Higgins, 101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: The Handbook of New Ideas for Business (Winter Park, FL: The New Management Publishing Company, 1994), 9–10.

  28. 28. John C. Dvorak, “Razors with No Blades,” Forbes (October 18, 1999): 168.

  29. 29. Claire Beale, “Strategic Thinking Will Never Rescue a Poor Creative Idea,” Campaign (August 24, 2001): 14.

  30. 30. Tim Hanrahan, “New Cellphone Service Helps Find Friends and Place to Hang Out,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2003, B1.

  31. 31. Bruce Orwall, “Universal’s Anxious Summer,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2003, B1.

  32. 32. Amy Dockser Marcus, “‘Hackathons’ Aim to Solve Health Care’s Ills,” Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2014, http://online.wsj.com; Ibby Caputo, “Hacking to Improve Health Care,” WGBH News, March 18, 2014, http://wgbhnews.org; Miguel Paz, “How to Organize a Successful Hackathon,” PBS Idea Lab, June 8, 2013, http://www.pbs.org; Erin Tao, “Hackathon Planning in Less than 10 Steps,” TechCrunch, March 31, 2012, http://techcrunch.com; Mikal E. Belicove, “Why and How to Host a Hackathon,” Entrepreneur, January 17, 2012, http://www.entrepreneur.com.

  33. 33. Kristinha McCort, “Learning a New Definition,” Millimeter 29, no. 11 (November 2001): 29–32.

  34. 34. Frances Horibe, “Innovation, Creativity, and Improvement,” The Canadian Manager 28, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 20.

  35. 35. Jeffrey R. Immelt, Vijay Govindarajan, and Chris Trimble, “How GE Is Disrupting Itself,” Harvard Business Review, October 2009, http://hbr.org.

  36. 36. For more information on these three contributions, see: Charles H. Fine and David H. Bridge, “Managing Quality Improvement,” in M. Sepheri, ed., Quest for Quality: Managing the Total System (Norcross, GA: Institute of Industrial Engineers, 1987), 66–74. See also: Klaus J. Zinc, “From Total Quality Management to Corporate Sustainability Based on Stakeholder Management,” Journal of Management History 13, no. 4 (2007): 394–401.

  37. 37. For some of Crosby’s more notable books in this area, see: Philip B. Crosby, Quality Is Free (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); Quality without Tears (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); Let’s Talk Quality: 96 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask Phil Crosby (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989); Leading (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990).

  38. 38. “The Push for Quality,” BusinessWeek (June 8, 1987): 131. For a study assessing the importance of total quality management in the workplace, see: Thomas J. Douglas and William Q. Judge, Jr., “Total Quality Management Implementation and Competitive Advantage: The Role of Structural Control and Exploration,” Academy of Management Journal 44, no. 1 (February 2001): 158–169.

  39. 39. Travis Hessman, “Michelin’s Obsession with Quality,” Industry Week, April 25, 2013, http://www.industryweek.com; Michelin, corporate website, http://www.michelin.com/corporate, accessed April 18, 2014; “J. D. Power: Michelin and Pirelli Rank Highest,” Modern Tire Dealer, March 27, 2014, http://www.moderntiredealer.com.

  40. 40. A. V. Feigenbaum, Total Quality Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983).

  41. 41. For a broadening discussion of a positive image, see: Susan Watkins, “A Positive Image Is Not Just the Business of Business,” Public Management 82, no. 7 (July 2000): 8–10.

  42. 42. From Michael Schroeder, “Heart Trouble at Pfizer,” BusinessWeek (February 26, 1990): 47–48.

  43. 43. Michael Gibbert and Philip Scranton, “Constraints as Sources of Radical Innovation? Insights from Jet Propulsion Development,” Management & Organizational History 4, no. 4 (2009): 385–399.

  44. 44. Scott F. Latham and Michael Braun, “Managerial Risk, Innovation, and Organizational Decline,” Journal of Management 35, no. 2 (March 2009): 258–281.

  45. 45. For a discussion of companies that have won the Malcolm Baldrige National Award, see: Karen Bemowski, “1994 Baldrige Award Recipients Share Their Expertise,” Quality Progress (February 1995): 35–40.

  46. 46. Michael Hammer, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Harvard Business Review (July/August 1990): 104–112.

  47. 47. See Deming’s 14 Points (January 1990 revision) from W. Edwards Deming, Out of Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986).

  48. 48. www.inventables.com.

  49. 49. Emily Lambert, “Gadgets to Go” Forbes 177, no. 12 (2006): 69–70.

  50. 50. Tony Deligio, “Interactive Materials Marketplace Helps Engineers and Resin Suppliers Connect” Plastics Today (May 10, 2010).

  51. 51. This case was based on information obtained from EASports.com.

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