How To Use Innovation And Creativity In The Workplace

Are you hungry to increase productivity in your workplace? Do you want to solve problems and enhance working relationships? A creative director with more than 25 years' experience, Patrick Collister introduces new ways to get the creative juices flowing. Whatever your career, how to: use innovation and creativity in the workplace is packed with simple and practical techniques that are easy to introduce into the working day. Find out how to encourage the exchange of ideas with colleagues and make meaningful and positive changes. Use technology and digital platforms, break established work patterns and engineer working environments to harness creative potential and increase innovation.

Combines psychological and organizational approaches to innovation in the workplace and suggests alternative theoretical and research directions. The contributions in this book achieve several significant aims: defining what is meant by innovation and providing cases as examples, illustrating interventions to facilitate innovation at work,integrating the ideas and experiences of researchers and practitioners, bringing together different perspectives from both American and European experts. All major research literature is reviewed and innovation is explored at all levels--from individual to group to organization.

Although many leaders acknowledge and invest in creativity, we seldom see it hold a credible place in the business development process. Creativity at Work takes a practical approach to creativity, showing how to select practices to produce results and add value. The authors explain how to: * Understand the creative preferences of organizations, departments, work groups, and individuals * Identify and compare the different creativity profiles that describe specific purposes, practices, and people * Produce the desired results by developing the right practices * Blend creativity practices to meet the complex needs that characterize most work situations o Develop required creative abilities in a team and in oneself

Super series are a set of workbooks to accompany the flexible learning programme specifically designed and developed by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) to support their Level 3 Certificate in First Line Management. The learning content is also closely aligned to the Level 3 S/NVQ in Management. The series consists of 35 workbooks. Each book will map on to a course unit (35 books/units).

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO license. This book comprehensively covers topics in knowledge management and competence in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, as well as knowledge capture and storage. Presented in accessible “chunks,” it includes more than 120 topics that are essential to high-performance organizations. The extensive use of quotes by respected experts juxtaposed with relevant research to counterpoint or lend weight to key concepts; “cheat sheets” that simplify access and reference to individual articles; as well as the grouping of many of these topics under recurrent themes make this book unique. In addition, it provides scalable tried-and-tested tools, method and approaches for improved organizational effectiveness. The research included is particularly useful to knowledge workers engaged in executive leadership; research, analysis and advice; and corporate management and administration. It is a valuable resource for those working in the public, private and third sectors, both in industrialized and developing countries.

This book reflects on the increasing variety of perspectives in organizational innovation research, paying attention to the antecedents, but also to the outcomes, of innovation. Some chapters analyze the ‘dark side’ of innovation, including the potential negative consequences of innovative behaviors, or of defying the innovation maximization fallacy. Others explicitly consider affective responses after innovation efforts, and assume that positive or negative effects rely on the context in which innovations occur, and on the way in which people manage the process of innovation. Several contributions adopt the dialectic approach by considering the multiple pathways and mechanisms that could lead to innovation at organizations. Most of the chapters include the interaction of actors’ characteristics (from employees or teams) together with situational constraints from the task or the social context, and outline the relevance of processes like team learning; motivation variables like basic need satisfaction; congruence of motives or meaningfulness at work; dynamics of communication networks; and affective variables. This edited collection offers a rich picture of current research and management trends in the field and contributes constructively toward promoting the dialectic perspective on creativity and innovation in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.

Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a variety of organizational settings. Individual Creativity in the Workplace identifies those factors, including what motivational and cognitive factors influence individual creativity, as well as the contextual factors that impact creativity such as teams and leadership.The book takes research findings out of the lab and provides examples of these findings put to use in real world organizations. Identifies factors facilitating or inhibiting creativity in organizational settings Summarizes research on creativity, cognition, and motivation Provides real world examples of these factors operating in organizations today Highlights creative thought processes and how to encourage them Outlines management styles and leadership to encourage creativity Explores how to encourage individual creativity in team contexts

Turn team members into innovators Most organizations approach innovation as if it were a sideline activity. Every so often employees are sent to “Brainstorm Island”: an off-site replete with trendy lectures, creative workshops, and overenthusiastic facilitators. But once they return, it’s back to business as usual. Innovation experts Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg suggest a better approach. They recommend that leaders at all levels become “innovation architects,” creating an ecosystem in which people engage in key innovation behaviors as part of their daily work. In short, this book is about getting to a state of “innovation as usual,” where regular employees—in jobs like finance, marketing, sales, or operations—make innovation happen in a way that’s both systemic and sustainable. Instead of organizing brainstorming sessions, idea jams, and off-sites that rarely result in success, leaders should guide their people in what the authors call the “5 + 1 keystone behaviors” of innovation: focus, connect, tweak, select, stealthstorm, (and the + 1) persist: • Focus beats freedom: Direct people to look only for ideas that matter to the business • Insight comes from the outside: Urge people to connect to new worlds • First ideas are flawed: Challenge people to tweak and reframe their initial ideas • Most ideas are bad ideas: Guide people to select the best ideas and discard the rest • Stealthstorming rules: Help people navigate the politics of innovation • Creativity is a choice: Motivate everyone to persist in the five keystone behaviors Using examples from a wide range of companies such as Pfizer, Index Ventures, Lonza, Go Travel, Prehype, DSM, and others, Innovation as Usual lights the way toward embedding creativity in the DNA of the workplace. So cancel that off-site. Instead, read Innovation as Usual—and put innovation at the core of your business.