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Creativity

Published on July 1, 2012 Reviewed on May 1, 2018   24 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
Hello, I am Christina Shalley, I am a Professor in the College of Management at Georgia Tech. Today, I will be speaking to you about creativity. Which represents my primary research area. Recently, there has been growing interest in the topic of creativity both from managers and researchers. I will be talking about results of much of this research in this presentation.
0:21
Here is the overview for this session. First, I will be discussing the definition of creativity, followed by Why creativity is particularly important for modern organizations. Then, I will spend some time talking about characteristics of creative individuals. Next, I will discuss creative thinking skills and some of the conceptual blocks to avoid in order to stimulate creative thinking. After this, I will talk about certain work environments that are more supportive of creative work than others. Then, I will discuss how managers can provide leadership for creativity. Finally, I will cover a number of important factors for Team creative performance.
0:57
Let's start by discussing what I mean by creativity. Creativity can be defined in two ways, as a process and as an outcome. It is believed that in order to produce creative outcomes it is important to first engage in certain cognitive and behavioral processes that can help enable individuals to be more creative at work. Some of these processes are to link ideas from multiple sources, conduct a broad search of your environment for relevant knowledge and the use of metaphors and analogies. The creative process is iterative and involves finding and solving new problems in different ways. Creative outcomes are the generation of ideas, solutions or processes that are novel, and appropriate for the situation. The boxes below show the process of creative problem solving. It starts with a problem, or issue being discovered, or presented, information has gathered, then a number of ideas are produced. From these ideas one that is considered creative is selected and then the ideas are implemented. The implementation stage is usually what people are referring to when they talk about innovation.