مدیریت خلاقیت در روابط بازار کسب و کار

The guest editors' introduction to the Special Issue on managing creativity in business market relationships positions the topic at the intersection between interorganizational research and creativity research. It introduces three paradoxes that managers of such processes face: a) the tension between the need for structure versus freedom to pursue new ideas, b) the dilemma between openness and organizational alignment, and c) the task of combining and prioritizing between inter- and intraorganizational views.

In step with the increased importance of innovation as a means of sustaining and developing competitive positions, firms increasingly seek to develop their creative capacity. Creative performance results in employees suggesting new and useful products and ideas, hence, creativity is a basic element of innovation (Amabile, 1988, Mumford et al., 2002, Oldham and Cummings, 1996 and Shalley and Gilson, 2004). Creative processes frequently call for the involvement of actors, activities and resources beyond the single organization. Creative outputs typically are collective rather than individual endeavors, based on social interrelations that transcend boundaries (Perry-Smith, 2006). This is especially true in the business-to-business context, where the involvement of suppliers and customers, is increasingly prominent in the development of new products and services. Also, it is difficult to be truly innovative without at least some minimal external input or inspiration. Organizations tend to become efficient through the building of routines and perspectives to which individual employees conform and which are strengthened by structures and systems, such as budget routines and departmentalizations of tasks (Weick, 1991). Creativity, on the other hand, calls for novel insights and non-traditional perspectives that may go beyond the taken-for-granted perspectives of organizational life. For this reason, external inputs are valuable if not critical for creative processes. However, spanning boundaries and seeking to create arenas for the creative interaction of internal and external views are not automatic and also are more complex than the boundary spanning activities involving industry buyers and sales people. Developing creativity is about exploring new possibilities and following what may often be vague ideas or hunches rather than seeking support to align resources and activities in order to increase efficiency. Ultimately, the task of creativity managers and employees is to fundamentally challenge existing ways of doing things within as well as across organizations. Combining research on inter-organizational relationships with research on creativity seems to offer a potential for fruitful insights into how to tackle the paradoxical challenges involved in managing creativity across boundaries. However, these streams of research exist almost independently of each other. The search for and integration of external knowledge inputs has been a topic in the innovation literature for some time (e.g., Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995 and Powell et al., 1996) and more recently has been discussed in the literature on open innovation (e.g., Boudreau and Lakhani, 2009 and Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007). However, this literature generally does not distinguish creative ideas and inputs from knowledge exchange and innovation activities more broadly. Rather, it looks in retrospective at the creative process as a preliminary phase in innovation activities, and overlooks the intricate problems of enrolling outsiders in the process of idea generation which may or may not lead to an innovative outcome. In the first case, it builds on the implicit assumption that the relevance of a particular knowledge input is easily determined, and that knowledge is clearly bounded if not objective. In the case of the creativity literature, this is concerned with the particular challenges associated with creative ideas and inputs — most often from the perspectives of individuals and organizations and rarely from the inter-organizational perspective. This Special Issue is positioned at the intersection between inter-organizational research and creativity research and, as such, is concerned specifically with how to tackle the challenges associated with organizing and managing knowledge that may be different from what was expected, or may appear to be slightly removed from or run counter to the routines and knowledge already in place. The purpose of this Special Issue is to improve our understanding of the organization and management of creativity in business market relationships, and the integration of external creative inputs into internal activities in particular. This editorial presents some of the main challenges in the organization and management of creativity across organizational boundaries and then introduces the papers that comprise this Special Issue. We make some links with the managerial issues and research themes raised in this collection of papers.