While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

Measurement of the process of innovation is critical for both practitioners and academics, yet the literature is characterized by a diversity of approaches, prescriptions and practices that can be confusing and contradictory. Conceptualized as a process, innovation measurement lends itself to disaggregation into a series of separate studies. The consequence of this is the absence of a holistic framework covering the range of activities required to turn ideas into useful and marketable products. We attempt to address this gap by reviewing the literature pertaining to the measurement of innovation management at the level of the firm. Drawing on a wide body of literature, we first develop a synthesized framework of the innovation management process consisting of seven categories: inputs management, knowledge management, innovation strategy, organizational culture and structure, portfolio management, project management and commercialization. Second, we populate each category of the framework with factors empirically demonstrated to be significant in the innovation process, and illustrative measures to map the territory of innovation management measurement. The review makes two important contributions. First, it takes the difficult step of incorporating a vastly diverse literature into a single framework. Second, it provides a framework against which managers can evaluate their own innovation activity, explore the extent to which their organization is nominally innovative or whether or not innovation is embedded throughout their organization, and identify areas for improvement.

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Innovation management measurement: A review

The Quark and the Jaguar

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/4006.pdf

Assessing the impact of organizational learning capability on product innovation performance: An empirical test

This study investigates the effects of information technology (IT) on exploration and exploitation in organizational learning (OL). We use qualitative evidence from previously published case studies of a single organization to extend an earlier computational model of organizational learning (March 1991) by introducing IT-enabled learning mechanisms: communication technology (e-mail), knowledge repositories of best practices, and groupware. We find that each of these IT-enabled learning mechanisms enable capabilities that have a distinct effect on the exploration and exploitation learning dynamics in the organization. We also find that this effect is dependent on organizational and environmental conditions, as well as on the interaction effects between the various mechanisms when used in combination with one another. We explore the implications of our results for the use of IT to support organizational learning.

http://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&context=icis2005

Information Technology and Organizational Learning: An Investigation of Exploration and Exploitation Processes

Linking operations strategy and product innovation: an empirical study of Spanish ceramic tile producers

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present design management as a dynamic capability and to analyze its mediating role between organizational learning capability and product innovation performance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modeling is used to test the research hypotheses based on data from the Italian and Spanish ceramic tile industries. The data are derived from the responses of 182 companies (50 percent of the target population) to a questionnaire addressed to Product Development Managers and Human Resource Managers.Findings – The results suggest that organizational learning capability enhances product innovation through the mediation of design management capability. The authors find an interesting interplay between organizational learning, design management capability and product innovation that can be very useful to better understand how to improve innovation performance. This finding shows that design management, as a dynamic capabilit...

/pdf/design-management-capability-and-product-innovation-in-smes-576cl4tg1m.pdf

Design management capability and product innovation in SMEs

The importance of the factors that facilitate organizational learning have traditionally been outlined in the literature. However, there is no agreement about what the essential facilitating factors are, as each author emphasizes different features. Complexity science is increasingly being used by researchers and practitioners to improve their understanding of organizations. This exploratory study tries to determine the essential facilitating factors for organizational learning, and demonstrate the importance of the ideas from complex adaptive systems (CAS) to it. In order to do this, we put forward a comparative case study of four heterogeneous companies from the Spanish ceramic tile sector in which we analyzed the facilitating factors for organizational learning, by relating them with ideas from CAS. As a result, we determined that the five attributes suggested by CAS to facilitate organizational learning were present in the innovative companies, which had the most organizational learning facilitating factors, and three of them were only present in the company with the highest performance and the most innovative approach: individuals’ relationship with the environment; cultural diversity; and state of equilibrium between formal and informal structures. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The facilitating factors for organizational learning: bringing ideas from complex adaptive systems

As stated by previous researchers, in an increasingly competitive environment, organizations need to develop successful innovations to compete and survive in the long term. Furthermore, sustainability and social issues are gaining increasing importance, to the extent that they are now a matter of high concern for firms and for society. Therefore, organizations cannot improve their results at any price and must be responsible for the consequences of their activities, including innovation. In these conditions, a growing demand for new leadership styles and behaviors arises to face this complex context. Stewardship is a leadership behavior that shows great concern for the impact of the organization’s activity on society. A quantitative study has been conducted with the purpose of providing empirical evidence of the relationship between leaders’ stewardship behavior and innovation success, using radical innovation as an explanatory variable. To confirm the hypotheses, structural equations were used on a dataset from a sample of 300 questionnaires from Spanish companies. The study empirically validates the proposed conceptual model. Results show how radical innovation fully mediates the relationship between leaders’ stewardship behavior and innovation success.

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The Influence of Leaders’ Stewardship Behavior on Innovation Success: The Mediating Effect of Radical Innovation

Este articulo examina la relacion entre la orientacion emprendedora y el desempeno innovador tomando como variable mediadora la capacidad de aprendizaje organizativo. Esta cuestion de investigacion es importante porque nos permite comprender mejor por que la orientacion emprendedora no afecta siempre de forma positiva a la cuenta de resultados. Consideramos que el desempeno innovador es una medida muy proxima al resultado general. Utilizando un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales en una muestra de 182 empresas de la industria ceramica, los resultados muestran que la capacidad de aprendizaje organizativo juega un rol fundamental en determinar los efectos de la orientacion emprendedora en el desempeno innovador.

/pdf/orientacion-emprendedora-capacidad-de-aprendizaje-29ha5my06k.pdf

Ricardo Chiva-Gómez

Papers

Linking operations strategy and product innovation: an empirical study of Spanish ceramic tile producers

Design management capability and product innovation in SMEs

The facilitating factors for organizational learning: bringing ideas from complex adaptive systems

The Influence of Leaders’ Stewardship Behavior on Innovation Success: The Mediating Effect of Radical Innovation

Orientación Emprendedora, Capacidad de Aprendizaje Organizativo y Desempeño Innovador