Evaluation of the Impacts of Innovation in the Health Care Sector: A comparative analysis

Assessing impacts related to the adoption of an innovation represents a particular challenge. However, the use of innovation in government organizations does have some effects: some intended, others unintended; some desirable, others undesirable. Findings in literature now suggest that the use of innovation in government organizations produces beneficial results for the most part. The purpose of this article is to provide a multi-dimensional framework for assessing the impacts of innovation on an organization’s performance as perceived by individual stakeholders and at organizational level. In particular, this framework is designed to evaluate the impacts resulting from the introduction of electronic medical records, namely an organizational, cultural, and technological innovation that many health care providers are currently undertaking. It provides the results of a comparative analysis carried out in Spain and Italy and discusses the need for a more systematic evaluation assessment of the innovation processes.     

How Does an Individual's Innate Preferences Impact Innovation and Creativity?

Organizational leaders commonly reward innovation and creativity and many times it is the individual with the “brilliant idea” who is recognized. The current article examines the four types of innovative ideas that lead to organizational change and effectiveness and how every person on a team plays a role in achieving the idea. As a manager or leader of people being aware of individual styles and preferences will lead to increased recognition of all innovative and creative contributions that can have a positive impact on organizational culture.     

How Does Cooperation and Competition Foster or Inhibit Creativity and Innovation?

The current article provides a brief insight into the relationship between cooperation and competition in organizational settings as they relate to the origination and proliferation of new ideas. Does cooperation stifle creativity? Does competition promote innovation? Or is it likely the answer resides in a more complex process somewhere in the middle? With a vested interest in organizational productivity, leadership should pay special attention to what social processes give rise to these phenomena.     

The distinctiveness of the European tradition in entrepreneurship research

Several previous studies have investigated creativity as an enhancer of innovation, their results showing that there is a positive relationship between the organizational creative climate and innovation. However, no research has been conducted on whether there is a saturation point beyond which an increase in creativity makes innovation performance decrease. In this article, we question the traditional positive relationship between creativity and innovation, and suggest that such a relationship is not linear, but has instead an inverted U-shape due to a saturation effect. We have developed a conceptual model to explain innovation performance considering creativity and network centrality, and it has been tested in the ceramic industrial cluster in Spain. Empirical findings support the inverted U-shaped relationship between creativity and innovation. The implications of these results in relation to creativity and innovation theory and practices are discussed.     

Strategies for Introducing Organizational Innovation to Public Service Organizations

As social systems, organizations need to ensure connectivity between established and deviant communication streams to accomplish organizational innovation. This article explores elements and systemic strategies of connectivity formation for the introduction of an organizational innovation such as the concept of crowd innovation in the public sector. For public administrations, crowd innovation represents an organizational innovation since it implies broad participation and the integration of external ideas, and thus often opposes prevalent organizational structures. Our findings contribute to the knowledge on systemic innovation management and suggest that public managers can enhance connectivity formation by addressing semantics, routines, practices, roles, and redundancies.     

Is It Only Good? The Dark Side of Leadership for Creativity and Innovation

It is assumed that leaders are essential in shaping and facilitating successful innovation and creativity in organizations. Both through direct leadership behaviors (e.g., by vision formulation) and through more indirect leadership behaviors (e.g., by role modeling). While these leadership behaviors seem both positive and productive, they may also hold risks of unintended, adverse results. In the current article, two ways are proposed in which this may occur: through contradictory leadership behaviors and a too‐much‐of‐a‐good‐thing effect. Future research in and awareness of the potential dark sides to leadership for creativity and innovation are warranted.     

Exploring the Role of IT in the Front-End of Innovation: An Empirical Study of IT-Enabled Creative Behavior

The front-end of innovation (FEI) is critical for successful innovation in contemporary organizations. Employee creativity, or creative behavior, is at the heart of the FEI and it encompasses three activities: idea generation, idea elaboration, and idea championing. Information technology (IT) can play an important role in enabling these activities but extant research has focused primarily on IT-enabled idea generation. This paper complements the extant research by examining the entire set of activities that compose FEI. Specifically, we develop a model that examines IT-enabled idea generation, IT-enabled elaboration and IT-enabled championing, and that, grounded in the componential theory of creativity, analyzes their key drivers. An empirical study establishes the applicability of the model. The paper contributes to IS research and practice by shedding light on the tripartite role that organizational IT can play in employee creativity, and it serves as a springboard for future research.     

Networked creativity: a structured management framework for stimulating innovation

The effect of today's turbulent environment means that organisations need to improve their competitive advantage and swiftly respond to changing technology and markets. An organisation's ability to continuously innovate its products and business systems is essential to its future success. However, this ability to stimulate innovation is highly dependent upon the stock of potential ideas and problem solutions, which is available to feed the innovation process. These ‘seedlings of innovation’ are the product of the creative processes of an organisation. Whilst continuous, sustainable innovation is an essential competitive capability for future organisational success, to date the creative process has been allowed to operate in an ‘ad hoc’ and serendipitous fashion. Continuous innovation means that organisations need to be able to effectively manage their creative processes to ensure their innovation process has a plentiful supply of good ideas and solutions. To this end, a framework for enhancing networked creativity is presented as a means towards the effective management of the creative process within organisations.     

Fear of Reprisal for Disclosing Union Interest: Assessing the Effectiveness of Perceived Anti-Unionism

We modeled a macro-level relationship at a micro-level level to examine the effectiveness of anti-unionism in psychological terms. We reasoned that fear of reprisal for disclosing union interest in the work environment was an affective response to perceived anti-unionism and hypothesized that fear of reprisal would disrupt the prediction of expression of this interest among nonunion employees (N = 1,010). With financial strain as a predictor of interest and fear of reprisal as a moderator, disruption was found. The results of the model are discussed in terms of the unintended consequences of anti-unionism, which, we argue, can include stress effects among employees and healthcare cost effects among employers.     

How Can Leaders Cultivate an Organizational Culture of Creativity and Innovation,Particularly in the Academy?

Cultivating creativity and innovation in the academy requires adaptive leadership to develop organizational capacity for collaboration and teamwork. To foster collective capacity for innovation, leaders can be guided by Kouzes and Posner's five practices of exemplary leadership.     

王村煤矿全员创新实现模式案例研究

近些年来,全员创新成为了企业研究的热点问题,许多企业也将全员创新作为加强自身竞争力的有效途径而推行。然而在实践中真正能够实现全员创新的企业并不多见。本文主要采用文献查阅和实地调研的方式,通过剖析王村煤矿创新历程,分析其全员创新的实现案例,总结全员创新实现模式。王村煤矿立足岗位的创新项目分类,＂个人创意＋组织后援＂的流程...     

The camp model for entrepreneurship teaching

Moving people from their normal work place or school environment to a camp site can be an efficient means for team building, creativity training and innovation boosting purposes. The camp model is increasingly used in the entrepreneurship education field as a supplement to classroom teaching. Some camps focus at the generation of ideas while others focus at the turning of ideas into concepts and rudimentary plans. By means of in-depth studies of three quite different camps, all demonstrating convincing results, the learning outcomes, pedagogies and principles for camps are identified and discussed.     

Fostering green product innovation through green entrepreneurial orientation: The roles of employee green creativity,green role identity,and organizational transactive memory system

Developing new green products is critical to an organization's achievement of sustainable goals as well as competitive advantage. This study aims to unravel the mechanisms through which organizations with green entrepreneurial orientation (green EO) can foster green product innovation. The dataset for testing these mechanisms was garnered from employees and managers who worked in manufacturing firms based in an Asia-Pacific market. Through a multilevel analysis of the data, the study revealed the positive nexus between organizational green EO and green product innovation. The results of the study further lent credence to employee green creativity as a mediation path for such a relationship. Furthermore, employee green role identity and organizational transactive memory system were found to fortify the linkage between green EO and employee green creativity. These results suggest to organizations how to optimally translate their green entrepreneurial strategy into new green products that met customer preferences and societal expectations.     

Making Innovation Happen in a Megaproject: London's Crossrail Suburban Railway System

Isolated pockets of innovation can be found in projects—such as the novel solution used to redesign the Velodrome roof during the London 2012 Olympics—but there have been few, if any, systematic efforts to manage innovation in a megaproject. This paper presents the initial findings of an ongoing three‐year (2012–2014) action research project between Crossrail and researchers at Imperial College London and University College London. Action research is well suited to a setting where an intervention is required to diagnose and solve an organizational problem and produce scientific findings (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Van de Ven, 2007). Undertaken in collaboration with practitioners, the aim of action research is to transform the research setting through a process of critical inquiry and action. Our engagement with Crossrail aimed to formulate and implement an innovation strategy to improve the performance and outcomes of the project. We identified four stages—or windows of opportunity—to intervene to generate, discover, and implement innovation in a megaproject: (1) the bridging window during the front‐end when ideas, learning, and practices from other projects and industries can be used to create an innovative project process, organization, and governance structure; (2) the engaging window, when tendering and contractual processes can be used by the client to encourage contractors and suppliers to develop novel ideas and innovative solutions; (3) the leveraging window, when all the parties involved—clients, delivery partners, and suppliers—are mobilized to develop novel ideas, new technologies, and organizational practices to improve performance; and (4) the exchanging window at the back‐end, when ideas and resources for innovation can be (re)combined with those of other projects in the wider innovation ecosystem to improve performance. The first two stages had largely occurred when we became involved in the Crossrail project in 2012. Our intervention addressed the final two stages, when we assisted in the development and implementation of an innovation strategy. Core to this strategy was a coordinated mobilization of the innovative capabilities across the project supply chain. Though, to be successful, this approach had to be open enough to span organizational boundaries beyond the supply chain, reaching into the broader ecosystem. The four windows provide a valuable new heuristic for organizing innovation in megaprojects, pointing to areas where project managers can craft targeted innovation interventions and compare their efforts with those of others.     

Developing the Modern Leader: Integrating Creativity and Innovation in the Mentor–Protégé Relationship

Mentoring has been identified as a key component to the development of leaders. Some of the most successful leaders in today's constantly evolving organizations rely heavily on creativity and innovation to drive their focus and action. The current brief paper will explore provoking ideas exploring the integration of creativity and innovation in the mentoring relationship to help better prepare and mold current and future leaders in all types of organizations.     

Managing Creative People: Strategies and Tactics for Innovation

With rapid changes in technology, and global competition, the success of many organizations has become progressively more dependent on their ability to bring innovative products to market. Ultimately, however, innovation depends on the generation of creative, new ideas. Accordingly, the literature bearing on the nature of creativity is reviewed to identify the conditions that influence innovation. Observations about the nature of creativity are used to draw conclusions about the kind of human resource management strategies that might enhance creativity. It is argued that organizations should consider multiple interventions that take into account the individual, the group, the organization, and the strategic environment when selecting interventions intended to enhance creativity.     

Creating space for play/invention – concepts of space and organizational entrepreneurship

This paper focuses on how one can relate management thinking/practices to entrepreneurial processes in the context of formal organization. In order to do this we develop a number of related ‘spatial concepts’ providing us with the possibility of describing entrepreneurship as a ‘creation and use of space for play/innovation’. Using concepts of space, the managerial and the entrepreneurial dimensions and perspectives on organizing creativity become highly visible in the case studied. This is a field study (within the ethnographic tradition) focusing on an organizational transformation of a former public authority into a competitive limited company. A distinction between managerialism and ‘entrepreneurship as event’ is proposed as conceptually fruitful as well as useful for discussing recommendations to managers for how to handle entrepreneurial processes. A minimal and contextual role for management is suggested when aspiring to support the creations of space for play/invention, for example, for entrepreneurship as forms of organizational creativity.     

For Rigour in Organizational Management Theory Research

Rigour is required in examining the empirical validity of theories in organizational management, and is often considered to be the opposite of creativity in the development of knowledge about managing organizations. In this article, we argue that rigour is necessary in the enterprise of organizational management research. Moreover, it can actually be a contributor to creativity. The issue is not rigour versus creativity, but rather how rigour can foster creativity. We show that rigour in both theory and methodology can foster creativity. Rigour in theory provides the logical thinking that is the foundation that allows the development of sound theory. This can be achieved in various ways, including theory building, mathematical modelling, causal modelling, and theory analysis. Rigour in methodology can assist creativity in quantitative integration. The contribution of rigour to creativity is evidenced by the recently created statistico‐organizational theory and other new advancements in the field of structural contingency research.     

Leadership and Creativity Are Important for Undergraduate Students: Our Journey

Ever wonder how an effective leadership program looks and feels to undergraduate students? As recent graduates of a program combining leadership, creativity, and innovation, we will explore how a challenging program helps students grow personally and professionally. The goal of the current article is to articulate what we see are the benefits of teaching leadership, creativity, and innovation to undergraduates. While crafting the article, the primary methods were observation and reflection as well as discussions on shared and unique experiences in the leadership program. Insights on steps to create and develop strong, effective leadership programs for more undergraduate students is provided.     

创新型企业的组织结构设计研究

成功的创新需要合适的组织结构的支撑,而当前的企业组织结构存在阻碍创新的弊端。创新型企业要求的组织结构应具有分权化和开放系统性特征,二元组织(Ambidextrous Organization)思想和生存系统模型(Viable Systems Model,VSM)为创新型企业的组织设计提供了新的思路。创新型企业应进行组织结构的重设,分别设立日常事务部和创新业务部,并将创新业务部分为创新业务经理、信息部、协调部、控制部和操作部,为提高创新型企业的自主创新能力提供组织保障。