We describe the development and validation of a new instrument, KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity, designed to assess perceived stimulants and obstacles to creativity in organizational work environments. The KEYS scales have acceptable factor structures, internal consistencies, test-retest reliabilities, and preliminary convergent and discriminant validity. A construct validity study shows that perceived work environments, as assessed by the KEYS scales, discriminate between high-creativity projects and low-creativity projects; certain scales discriminate more strongly and consistently than others. We discuss the utility of this tool for research and practice.

Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity

Innovation is defined as the development and implementation of new ideas by people who over time engage in transactions with others within an institutional order. This definition focuses on four basic factors new ideas, people, transactions, and institutional context. An understanding of how these factors are related leads to four basic problems confronting most general managers: 1 a human problem of managing attention, 2 a process problem in managing new ideas into good currency, 3 a structural problem of managing part-whole relationships, and 4 a strategic problem of institutional leadership. This paper discusses these four basic problems and concludes by suggesting how they fit together into an overall framework to guide longitudinal study of the management of innovation.

/pdf/central-problems-in-the-management-of-innovation-2g1fe8bbck.pdf

Central problems in the management of innovation

This study examined the relationship between the demography of top management teams and corporate strategic change, measured as absolute change in diversification level, within a sample of Fortune ...

Top Management Team Demography and Corporate Strategic Change

A set of ground rules and vocabulary to facilitate focused discussion about the structure of organization and management theories are proposed. The many previous efforts at defining and evaluating theory help establish criteria for theory construction and evaluation. In the establishment of these criteria, description is distinguished from theory, and a matrix of criteria for evaluating the variables, constructs, and relationships that together compose a theory is developed. The proposed matrix may be useful both for defining the necessary components of good theory and for evaluating and/or comparing the quality of alternative theories. Finally, a discussion of the way theories fit together to give a somewhat broader picture of empirical reality reveals the lines of tension between the two main criteria for evaluating theory.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258555.pdf

Organizational Theories: Some Criteria for Evaluation

In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment QFD. QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the "voice of the customer" is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first "house" of QFD, customer needs are linked to design attributes thus encouraging the joint consideration of marketing issues and engineering issues. This paper focuses on the "Voice-of-the-Customer" component of QFD, that is, the tasks of identifying customer needs, structuring customer needs, and providing priorities for customer needs.

In the identification stage, we address the questions of 1 how many customers need be interviewed, 2 how many analysts need to read the transcripts, 3 how many customer needs do we miss, and 4 are focus groups or one-on-one interviews superior? In the structuring stage the customer needs are arrayed into a hierarchy of primary, secondary, and tertiary needs. We compare group consensus affinity charts, a technique which accounts for most industry applications, with a technique based on customer-sort data. In the stage which provides priorities we present new data in which product concepts were created by product-development experts such that each concept stressed the fulfillment of one primary customer need. Customer interest in and preference for these concepts are compared to measured and estimated importances. We also address the question of whether frequency of mention can be used as a surrogate for importance. Finally, we examine the stated goal of QFD, customer satisfaction. Our data demonstrate a self-selection bias in satisfaction measures that are used commonly for QFD and for corporate incentive programs.

We close with a brief application to illustrate how a product-development team used the voice of the customer to create a successful new product.

https://www.mit.edu/~hauser/Papers/Gaskin_Griffin_Hauser_et_al%20VOC%20Encyclopedia%202011.pdf

Donald C. Peltz

Papers

Scientists in Organizations