Building Leadership Effectiveness This program encourages leaders to develop practices that transform values into action, vision into realities, obstacles into innovations, and risks into rewards. Participants will be introduced to the five practices of exemplary leadership: modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart Coaching & Communicating for Performance Coaching & Communicating for Performance is a highly interactive program that will give supervisors and managers the opportunity to build skills that will enable them to share expectations and set objectives for employees, provide constructive feedback, more effectively engage in learning conversations, and coaching opportunities. Skillful Conflict Management for Leaders As a leader, it is important to understand conflict and be effective at conflict management because the way conflict is resolved becomes an integral component of our university’s culture. This series of conflict management sessions help leaders learn and put into practice effective strategies for managing conflict.

기독교 사역과 Leadership

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Social Psychology of Organizations

Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology

Models that depict innovation as a smooth, well-behaved linear process badly misspecify the nature and direction of the causal factors at work. Innovation is complex, uncertain, somewhat disorderly, and subject to changes of many sorts. Innovation is also difficult to measure and demands close coordination of adequate technical knowledge and excellent market judgment in order to satisfy economic, technological, and other types of constraints—all simultaneously. The process of innovation must be viewed as a series of changes in a complete system not only of hardware, but also of market environment, production facilities and knowledge, and the social contexts of the innovation organization.

An Overview of Innovation

Introduction In today's business world, innovations provide companies with major opportunities and advantages. Innovation can be defined as the outcome of a set of activities that use knowledge to create new value to those benefiting from its use (de Sousa, 2006). It is commonly accepted that innovations are brought forward in an interactive process of knowledge generation and application. Organizations need to generate knowledge, facilitate the sharing of knowledge, and apply the knowledge so that the organization can generate innovation. Innovative organizations use knowledge creatively. Creativity is the component that enhances the organizations' ability to retain their competitive advantage as well as to stay ahead of their competitors. For this type of organizations, the ideas and insights of their employees are of crucial importance. However, much innovation potential remains unexploited because organizations assign the responsibility of getting new and implementable ideas only to the RD Chesbrough, 2003; Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2001). To remain competitive, organizations need their employees to be actively involved in their work and try to generate novel and suitable products, processes, and approaches (Shalley & Gilson, 2004). Many achievements in companies involve collaboration between many creative individuals, each with varying knowledge, skills, life experience, perspectives, and expertise. These kinds of collectives can tackle multi-faceted challenges that cannot be met individually. Nowadays we do not only speak about individual creativity but also about collective creativity (Hargadon & Beckhy, 2006; Sawyer, 2006). Collective creativity can be defined as creative processes leading to creative products that are the results of interaction between two or more people. In collective creativity, it is impossible to trace the source of new ideas to an individual. Instead, creative activity emerges from the collaboration and contribution of many individuals, thereby blurring the contribution of specific individuals in creating ideas. In this study, the focus is on investigating the concepts of creativity and collective creativity in the context of promoting the employees' creativeness and innovativeness. The research problem is: how to enhance collective creativity in the organization. The research questions are: how do the employees themselves perceive creativity in their work place, and in what way would they support creativity and especially collective creativity in the organization? The case study is based on empirical data from an action research based process conducted in one private company. The Creation of New Knowledge An organization's success and survival depend on its capability to create new knowledge and then innovation. Knowledge is an organization's most valuable resource because it embodies intangible assets, routines, and creative processes that are difficult to imitate. According to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and rapidly include it in new products. These characteristics define a "knowledge creating" company, whose business consists solely of continuous innovation. The key to success in a knowledge company is to build the intellectual capital that will create core competencies and distinctive products that will lead to superior results. Everybody is a knowledge worker in a knowledge creating company, where inventing new knowledge is a way of behaving. The central activity of a knowledge-creating company is to make personal knowledge available to others. This takes place continuously and at all levels of an organization. A constructivist view of knowledge focuses on the intraorganizational processes through which new knowledge is generated and has highlighted the importance of both social practices within which new knowledge is created and social interaction through which new knowledge emerges (Tsoukas, 2009). …

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Experiencing Creativity in the Organization: From Individual Creativity to Collective Creativity

Purpose – Studies with a user approach in a public service context are still rare, making the contribution of this study worthwhile. This paper aims to present a case of facilitating innovativeness by involving stakeholder groups in the development of service production in the public sector. The case is related to the provision of housing and well‐being services to ageing people. The study proposes focusing on the front‐end stage of an innovation process: the ideation phase in a virtual idea generation environment, in which fruitful and fresh ideas that are based on customers' needs are sought for in order to support the innovation process.Design/methodology/approach – A constructive research approach is applied in this study. Central theoretical building blocks are provided by the extended SECI model as presented by Uotila, Melkas and Harmaakorpi, Amabile's componential theory of creativity and Burt's and Granovetter's arguments regarding structural holes and weak ties.Findings – Based on the evaluation,...

Challenges of multi‐actor involvement in the public sector front‐end innovation processes: Constructing an open innovation model for developing well‐being services

The centres of collective creativity tend to be at the intersections of different domains. Based on this, distances between innovating partners can be considered as sources of innovation. However, the literature usually emphasises the advantages of proximity. Proximity may, however, also have negative impacts due to the problem of lock-in – meaning a lack of openness and flexibility. This article takes the changed pattern of innovation as a point of departure: innovations are seen to emerge in nonlinear processes, often combining very diverse knowledge bases. Structural holes in networks of innovation systems are especially fruitful for innovation. In theoretical discussion, this article presents seven dimensions of distance: cognitive, communicative, organisational, functional, cultural, social, and geographical. In attempts to create innovation, different kinds of distances would need to be exploited knowingly. The study uses the experiences of the case study to answer how it is possible to span the structural holes in cross-disciplined multi-actor innova-tion. According to the experiences, the brokerage function is essential in exploiting the different kinds of distances. Indeed, it was necessary to define two brokerage functions: process brokerage and session brokerage.

Collective Creativity and Brokerage Functions in Heavily Cross-Disciplined Innovation Processes

Parjanen Satu CREATING POSSIBILITIES FOR COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY Brokerage Functions in Practice-Based Innovation Lappeenranta 2012 166 pages, 7 figures, 12 tables Acta Universitatis Lappeenrantaensis 474 Diss. Lappeenranta University of Technology ISBN 978-952-265-233-1, ISBN 978-952-265-234-8 (PDF), ISSN 1456-4491 In the network era, creative achievements like innovations are more and more often created in interaction among different actors. The complexity of today‘s problems transcends the individual human mind, requiring not only individual but also collective creativity. In collective creativity, it is impossible to trace the source of new ideas to an individual. Instead, creative activity emerges from the collaboration and contribution of many individuals, thereby blurring the contribution of specific individuals in creating ideas. Collective creativity is often associated with diversity of knowledge, skills, experiences and perspectives. Collaboration between diverse actors thus triggers creativity and gives possibilities for collective creativity. This dissertation investigates collective creativity in the context of practice-based innovation. Practice-based innovation processes are triggered by problem setting in a practical context and conducted in non-linear processes utilising scientific and practical knowledge production and creation in cross-disciplinary innovation networks. In these networks diversity or distances between innovation actors are essential. Innovation potential may be found in exploiting different kinds of distances. This dissertation presents different kinds of distances, such as cognitive, functional and organisational which could be considered as sources of creativity and thus innovation. However, formation and functioning of these kinds of innovation networks can be problematic. Distances between innovating actors may be so great that a special interpretation function is needed – that is, brokerage. This dissertation defines factors that enhance collective creativity in practice-based innovation and especially in the fuzzy front end phase of innovation processes. The first objective of this dissertation is to study individual and collective creativity at the employee level and identify those factors that support individual and collective creativity in the organisation. The second objective is to study how organisations use external knowledge to support collective creativity in their innovation processes in open multi-actor innovation. The third objective is to define how brokerage functions create possibilities for collective creativity especially in the context of practice-based innovation. The research objectives have been studied through five substudies using a case-study strategy. Each substudy highlights various aspects of creativity and collective creativity. The empirical data consist of materials from innovation projects arranged in the Lahti region, Finland, or materials from the development of innovation methods in the Lahti region. The Lahti region has been chosen as the research context because the innovation policy of the region emphasises especially the promotion of practice-based innovations. The results of this dissertation indicate that all possibilities of collective creativity are not utilised in internal operations of organisations. The dissertation introduces several factors that could support collective creativity in organisations. However, creativity as a social construct is understood and experienced differently in different organisations, and these differences should be taken into account when supporting creativity in organisations. The increasing complexity of most potential innovations requires collaborative creative efforts that often exceed the boundaries of the organisation and call for the involvement of external expertise. In practice-based innovation different distances are considered as sources of creativity. This dissertation gives practical implications on how it is possible to exploit different kinds of distances knowingly. It underlines especially the importance of brokerage functions in open, practice-based innovation in order to create possibilities for collective creativity. As a contribution of this dissertation, a model of brokerage functions in practice-based innovation is formulated. According to the model, the results and success of brokerage functions are based on the context of brokerage as well as the roles, tasks, skills and capabilities of brokers. The brokerage functions in practice-based innovation are also possible to divide into social and cognitive brokerage.

Creating possibilities for collective creativity : Brokerage Functions in Practice-Based Innovation

The open innovation approach emphasizes the importance of service and product users as a source of novel ideas. An essential question is how user-driven innovation is conducted. Information and communications technology offers various new opportunities and means of acquiring information about users and engaging them in innovation activity. This study investigates brokerage functions in a virtual environment where people with diverse experience, areas of expertise and perspectives collaborate. The research question is how brokerage functions are able to create possibilities for collective creativity. The study focuses on the front-end stage of an innovation process: the ideation phase in a virtual idea generation environment, in which fruitful and fresh ideas based on users; or potential users’, needs are sought for in order to support the innovation process.

Satu Parjanen

Papers

Experiencing Creativity in the Organization: From Individual Creativity to Collective Creativity

Challenges of multi‐actor involvement in the public sector front‐end innovation processes: Constructing an open innovation model for developing well‐being services

Collective Creativity and Brokerage Functions in Heavily Cross-Disciplined Innovation Processes

Creating possibilities for collective creativity : Brokerage Functions in Practice-Based Innovation

Brokerage functions in a virtual idea generation platform: Possibilities for collective creativity?