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Detailed information |
Pre-requisites |
SE BC2: Induction: Team development UND SE BC1: Foundations of management UND KS BC3: Foundations of management science
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Original study plan |
Master's programme Leadership and Innovation in Organizations 2024W |
Objectives |
Phase I: Innovation Challenge — Delving into the Creative Process
Task: Teams of approximately five students are each presented with a creative challenge. One team member is assigned the role of the reporter, who carefully documents the creative process (i.e. how the other team members deal with the creative challenge and implement a legal, creative solu¬tion)—without however directly engaging in this process.
Coaching: Each team is offered a half-hour coaching session. Teams come prepared to their coaching sessions, presenting specific and already-tested ideas on how to cope with their challenge (i.e. alternative creative solutions). Coaches help with assessing and refining these ideas and potential solutions, as well as assist in exploring those aspects of the task (challenge) that appear most challenging to the team.
Deliverable: Each team prepares a 25-minute presentation,
- showing the final result, i.e. the solution that meets their challenge,
- describing and reflecting on the process through which the team arrived at their result,
- including individual and team observations and reflections regarding the knowledge from Amabile (1998) and Dyer and his colleagues (2009).
Phase II: On Creative People
Preparatory task: To be announced in class at the end of Workshop I.
- Workshop II: Creative Networks
- On successful completion of Workshop I are able to provide accurate and critically reflective answers to the following questions: How do weak and strong ties influence individuals’ creativity? What is knowledge brokering? How does someone’s position in a social network affect his or her creativity? Which social network structures foster team creativity? What is the role of support in creativity? What specific network constellations enable creativity during different phases of the creative process?
- Workshop III: Creative Individuals
- On successful completion of Workshop I are able to provide accurate and critically reflective answers to the following questions: What is the role of expertise, dedication and passion in creativity? How do highly successful entrepreneurs describe their creative abilities, and what can others learn from that? Can boredom foster creativity? How do emotions effect creativity and creative processes? Is it possible to train for creativity and, if so, how?
On successful completion of this course, students will have the ability to:
- LO1: Students are capable of self-organizing in teams that can (a) interpret ambiguous instructions, (b) combine their abilities to analyze, imagine and experiment in order to design a both suitable and creative solution, (c) prioritize and execute implementation measures and finally (c) present, explain and justify their solution.
- LO2: Students are capable of (a) perceiving both the team dynamics as well as their own role in it, (b) critically reflect on these perceptions and (c) develop recommendations for how to improve their own leadership skills.
- LO3: Students are capable of (a) perceiving and interpreting the creative process, (b) critically reflect on these perceptions and (c) develop recommendations for how to improve the team’s and their individual creative skills.
- LO4: Students understand the key capabilities and practices of highly creative individuals and can draw personal and managerial conclusions from this knowledge.
- LO5: Students understand the role of social-network ties, positions and morphologies in individual and team creativity and can draw personal and managerial conclusions from this knowledge.
- LO6: Students are capable of acquiring scientific knowledge from primary sources, by summarizing articles, determining their key messages and critically evaluating them.
- LO7: Students can analyze academic literature for its practical implications and put their results to test.
- LO8: Students can succinctly formulate, explain and justify their opinion about creativity, creative people and creative processes.
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Subject |
Arguably, technically advanced and wealthy societies rely increasingly on innovation as their primary driver of economic development. Consequently, human resources, specifically highly quali¬fied, creative people have become the most important economic resource—sought after by firms and regions alike. This course focuses on creativity as a human capacity that everyone possesses to a greater or lesser extent and on particularly creative people—who they are and what they do.
This course is predicated on the notion of the reflective practitioner, who actively engages in and shapes creative processes while—with varying intensity—monitoring, reflecting on and developing his or her own behavior and its results. Interestingly, innovative action and knowledge about innovation can both support and undermine each other. Therefore, this course invites students to explore the relationship between knowing and doing by both engaging in a concrete creative process and acquiring ad¬vanced, sophisticated scholarly knowledge about creativity.
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Criteria for evaluation |
- Presence in class is mandatory.
Phase 1: The criteria for evaluating a presentation (i.e. team task) are as follows:
- To what extent does the solution meet the criteria implicit in the challenge?
- How original is the solution and how professionally is it implemented?
- How clear and convincing are the description, explanation and justification of the solution and how perceptive and insightful is the reflection on the team’s creative process?
—>LO1, LO2, LO3, LO8
Phase 2:
- The preparatory task is graded ‘pass or fail’.
—>LO6, LO7
- In the final exam students are required to answer open questions about the core readings for and teachings during work¬shops II and III.
—>LO4, LO5, LO6, LO7, LO8
- To pass this course, a student must pass the preparatory tasks, and both the team task and the final exam must be graded ‘4’ or better.
- If so, the final grade is equally composed of the team task (=50% team achievement) and the final exam (=50% individual achievement).
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Methods |
In the first phase of the course students actively engage in innovation challenges and gain first-hand experiential knowledge about creative processes. In the second phase they work with ad¬vanced academic lit¬erature and engage in profound dialogues to acquire state of the art scientific knowledge about creative people and how to manage them.
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Language |
English |
Study material |
Core Readings
- Amabile, TM. 1998. How to Kill Creativity in Organizations. Harvard Business Review, 76/5: 76–87.
- Baas, M, CKW De Dreu & BA Nijstad. 2008. Supplemental Material for a Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of Mood–Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus? Psychological Bulle-tin, 134/6: 779-806.
- Dyer, JH, HB Gregersen & CM Christensen. 2009. The Innovators DNA. Harvard Business Review, 87(12): 61-67.
- Elsbach, KD & AB Hargadon. 2006. Enhancing Creativity through "Mindless" Work: A Framework of Workday Design. Organization Science, 17/4: 470-483.
- Obstfeld, D. 2005. Social Networks, the Tertius lungens Orientation, and Involvement in Innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50/1: 100–130.
- Perry-Smith, JE & PV Mannucci. 2017. From Creativity to Innovation: The Social Network Drivers of the Four Phases of the Idea Journey. Academy of Management Review, 42/1: 53-79.
- Perry-Smith, JE. 2006. Social yet Creative: The Role of Social Relationships in Facilitating Individual Creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 49/1: 85–101.
- Scott, G, LE Leritz & MD Mumford. 2004. The effectiveness of creativity training: A meta-analysis. Creativity Research Journal, 16/4: 361-388.
- Sosa, ME. 2011. Where Do Creative Interactions Come From? The Role of Tie Content and Social Networks. Organization Science, 22/1: 1–21.
Further Readings
- Burt, R. 2005. Brokerage and Closure. New York: Oxford University Press. Chapters 1 and 3
- ,Granovetter, M. 1973. The Strengh of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78/6: 1360-1380.
- Ward, TB. 2004. Cognition, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 19/2: 173-188.
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Changing subject? |
No |
Further information |
For quality assurance and improvement purposes, please participate in all
JKU course evaluations and surveys!
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Corresponding lecture |
986CABUCB2K19: CB2 Understanding innovation
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