Abstract

Organizations possess great opportunities in applying their creative potential to pursue success and competitive strength. This makes it important for managers to adopt a management style that encourages employees to come up with new ideas. It is crucial not to exclude anybody from this creative process. Organizations that confine their focus to creative jobs like in marketing and in Research & Development, risk missing out on opportunities. Creativity-focused leadership embedded in a fertile organizational climate can generate a harvest of ideas for improvement and innovation from the entire workforce. These new thoughts are often urgently needed to achieve goals like reducing costs, improving quality and introducing new products and services. They open new avenues for growth, competitiveness and success. On the part of management this calls for open communication on the issues facing the organization, unit or department and an invitation for everybody to come with solutions. By stimulating and organizing knowledge-sharing, a company can feed the process of forming new ideas. Cross-fertilization of knowledge and ideas is necessary to develop new perspectives. One way to do this is by arranging meetings with people from completely different industries and disciplines. Setting challenging targets mobilizes the creativity of people further. If the creative tension that this yields, is accompanied by a tolerant management attitude towards failure, a stimulating context is created for experimenting and entrepreneurship. It will be a setting where people put forward ideas on their own initiative. In addition, management have to allow people sufficient time to work on their own ideas. Creativity techniques are useful as a stepping-stone towards taking new and promising thought paths and offer therefore the possibility to generating a large number of ideas. Idea management, as the set of activities for identifying, selecting, rewarding and polishing ideas for implementation, ensure that the harvested creativity is used. Regardless of size, industry, strategy and growth phase, all organizations need to utilize the creative capacities of their employees. The choice between productivity and creativity is often considered a dilemma, but in fact it is not. Productivity allows us to deliver to the customer. With creativity, we can continue delivering to disloyal and demanding customers. After all, creativity enables us to think and see differently. Our creativity allows us to answer the question: How can we do it better, smarter and more productively? The government can play an important role in stimulating and utilizing creativity. Ways of doing this include promoting knowledge-sharing on excellent creative organizations, devoting greater attention in the education system to creative thinking and systematically harvesting creative ideas from the population. For its part, the government must set an inspirational example when it comes to managing creativity.