Creativity Is Vital to Engineering

Throughout history, a key factor in human development has been our ability to solve problems. Those problems take a variety of forms, but many of the most critical ones have been problems that are highly amenable to the application of engineering in the sense defined by the U.S. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) – that is, solutions that, at their core, make use of the “materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind”. Thus, the problem of warmth and shelter was solved by mankind's ability to create structures from stone, wood and other materials. The problem of feeding large numbers of people was tackled by the development of the plough and irrigation. Problems of health were solved by the creation of systems for removing and processing waste. Our success at solving these problems through the application of engineering has resulted in rapid growth and development.

It is important to note, however, that this process of problem solving for human development is highly dynamic in nature. We are all too familiar with the fact that each solution that is developed contains the seeds of new problems. The solutions developed and applied since the industrial revolution – for example, steam engines, the use of coal as a fuel, the development of internal combustion engines, the exploitation of oil – have provided many benefits, but they also have given rise to new problems that themselves must be addressed. Pollution and climate change, for example, are by-products of earlier solutions that now stimulate both a drive to replace those older technologies with better and more efficient solutions, as well as a push to mitigate the undesirable effects of earlier systems.

Where does creativity come into play in this process of engineering solutions for the needs of mankind? The cycle of problem–solution–problem–solution has one distinct characteristic that explains why creativity is so vital to engineering, and therefore to society. Every time a new problem emerges – one that is unprecedented or has never been seen before – it is axiomatic that previous solutions will not be suitable.

Part 1 of this book presented a framework of four building blocks – person, product, process, and press – that together, as a system, are necessary for innovation. The role that each of these plays in the generation and exploitation of ideas was explained along with some of the challenges that they present to managers seeking to steer their innovation process to a successful outcome. To realize the full value and potential of innovation in organizational settings, however, it is necessary to be able to answer not just subjective, qualitative questions about the people involved, the products developed, the processes used, or the settings in which these are located. Managing and controlling innovation in an organizational context also raises objective, quantitative questions.

It is easy to see why this issue – measurement – is so important to successful innovation. It is one thing for a manager to demand more creative products, but deciding how much more requires a degree of objectivity, rigor, and repeatability. Decision-making processes – one of the convergent aspects of innovation (see Chapter 3) – cannot proceed effectively without an objective basis for selecting product A over product B. Continuous improvement and the ability to learn from mistakes are also harder if organizations cannot reflect on a failed innovation and understand if the product was, for example, too novel or perhaps not effective enough. By the same token, as managers seek to improve their organization's capacity for innovation, they cannot proceed in forming effective teams if they know nothing about the people who make up those teams. If team innovation, for instance, is facilitated by a diverse mix of people who are highly open to experience, excellent convergent thinkers, or willing to take risks, the ability to measure these aspects of the person would be helpful.

The same is true of the processes used to generate novel ideas and the environment in which innovation takes place. The successful management of innovation is built on a foundation of objective measurement of the person, product, process, and press. This chapter addresses the question of measurement for each of the building blocks.

Chapter 1 argued that the Four Ps model of creativity needs refinement if it is to prove useful in understanding innovation. The purpose of the next four chapters of the book is to carry out the necessary reworking of the Ps approach in order to develop a model of innovation based on the building blocks of product, process, person, and press. The present chapter begins the necessary reworking by examining the most obvious building block: the public face of innovation – product.

The Usefulness Imperative

The nineteenth-century French novelist Théophile Gautier stated in the preface to a product of his own aesthetic creativity – his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, published in 1836 – that “nothing is truly beautiful unless it is useless” (emphasis added). This rejection of usefulness is typical of the notion of creativity seen in the art for art's sake movement, of which Gautier was a leading representative. In the early years of the modern creativity era, that is, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was still resistance to the systematic study of creativity on the grounds that it is ineffable and inscrutable, a mystical, divine phenomenon beyond the understanding of mere mortals and thus above trivial considerations such as usefulness. A modern version of the rejection of concrete products and endorsement of the idea that creativity is purely spiritual was articulated by Rothman (2014). He complained about what he called creativity creep, defining the term as a shift away from conceiving of creativity as a way of being – a position of which he approved – to seeing it as a way of doing – a position of which he disapproved. In rejecting the linking of creativity to tangible products he stated: “If you're really creative, really imaginative, you don't have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel” (emphasis added).

However, within the framework of a discussion of innovation in organizations, simply feeling creative without actually doing anything is of limited interest, and uselessness in a product is not a virtue at all. Levitt (2002) was particularly scathing in his comments about people within organizations who are eager to advance novel ideas but regard the question of whether they can be implemented as an unnecessary hindrance to their creativity.

In the previous chapter, the measurement of the building blocks of innovation – person, product, process, and press – was discussed. To understand innovation as a systems phenomenon – an emergent property of a set of interacting components – it will be clear that the building blocks cannot simply be assessed separately and individually in order to gain insights into the resultant organizational outcomes. Innovation managers also need to move beyond understanding outcome in the narrow, proximate sense of the ideas generated and instead examine outcomes in their broader, business context, consistent with a focus on organizational innovation. To do this it is logical to ask, What are the visible, external, and measurable signs of successful innovation? How does a manager know when creative individuals are working effectively together, in a favorable setting, to develop novel and useful products that form the basis of a business enterprise? What is the effect, in the broadest sense, that results from the interaction of the person, product, process, and press?

Part of this shift in scale and focus is a shift away from the relatively simple realm of smaller numbers of observable variables, and relationships among those variables, to the more complex interaction of larger numbers of latent variables, with multiple predictive relationships and associations, and competing models. To assist in understanding the relationships between the independent and dependent variables that define the innovation process, this chapter uses path diagrams and concepts from structural equation modeling (SEM). For a more detailed discussion of this methodology, see Grace, Schoolmaster, Guntenspergen, Little, Mitchell, Miller, and Schweiger 2012).

Studying the effect of innovation in an organizational context means studying organizational performance. In the literature of organizations and innovation, the popular term that describes this is firm performance. It is axiomatic, in studying organizational innovation, that “all the innovative activities must result in better firm performance compared to companies that do not innovate” (Kemp, Folkeringa, De Jong, & Wubben, 2003, p. 18). However, the task is not simply to survey the different ways that firm performance is measured in practice; rather, it is to take a step back to a more theoretical foundation and question what managers should be measuring.

Innovation has been examined so far in terms of two building blocks: commercially salient products and the thinking processes leading to them. However, it can also be looked at in terms of the personal resources of individual people who engage in the process of generating commercially salient novelty. The need for an examination of such aspects of innovation was underlined by Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen (2009, p. 60) in their review of the role of the person in innovation. They stated there that we “know very little about what makes one person more [innovative] than another.” Although they actually used the word creative in the passage just cited, the focus of their discussions was unmistakably innovation. Bearing in mind Nussbaum's (2013) call for a proactive approach (Chapter 1), these personal properties can be thought of as psychological resources (Rauch, Wiklund, Lumpkin, & Frese, 2009) that function as “antecedents of proactive behavior” (Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006, p. 636). Anticipating later sections, these resources include:

1. (a) personal styles, such as openness to experience or tolerance for uncertainty

2. (b) affective states, such as motivation or feelings

3. (c) cognitive properties, such as expertise and information-processing skills

Conceptualizing Person in Innovation

In a discussion directly related to the person in innovation, Crant (2000, p. 440) referred to the proactive personality, and Parker, Williams, and Turner (2006) also described the proactive personality. More recently, Lynch, Walsh, and Harrington (2010) defined innovativeness as an “innate human personality trait” (p. 7). Collis (2010) also discussed the role of personality in innovation. However, the use of the term personality may raise problems for readers. In psychological discussions, personality is usually understood as involving traits such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, adaptability, persistence, or imaginativeness, or broad dispositions such as extraversion/introversion, which are thought to be at least partly biologically determined (see, for example, Eysenck, 1952) or to be laid down in early years and to remain stable throughout life, except perhaps when they are modified through therapy. An example of the latter is the psychoanalytic model of personality. Thus, the idea of the creative personality seems to suggest that the personal resources of the innovative individual consist of specific personality traits that are laid down very early and are immutable or nearly so, and lead the person who possesses the necessary traits more or less inevitably to emit innovative behavior.

The ideal output of the innovative process is a novel, relevant, commercially effective, elegant, and genetic product. The question that now arises is: What processes give rise to the ideas for such products? In answering this question, the present chapter will focus on the building block of thinking. Reduced to its barest essentials, thinking involves obtaining information, sorting/categorizing and storing it, recalling it, and (re)applying it. As a building block of innovation, thinking involves special or particular cognitive actions such as making associations between or among remote pieces of information, seeing unexpected implications of facts, transferring existing knowledge to new situations, or interpreting events broadly. An amusing if rather disgusting example of the application of such processes to generate the novelty for a commercially successful product was given by Gordon (1961). He described how the problem of the last drops dripping onto the table cloth after tomato ketchup has been poured out of the bottle was solved by seeing a link between this problem and the way a horse's anus controls the flow of feces, and designing a nondrip tomato ketchup bottle cap based on this insight!

Components of the Process of Innovative Thinking

In an early discussion written from the point of view of organizational theory, Roberts (1988) made a distinction that is helpful for present purposes: He divided the process of innovation into two subprocesses that he labeled invention and exploitation. Invention is related, as the term itself indicates, to production of novelty, while exploitation is linked to identifying and utilizing the novelty in a commercially successful way. More recent writers have also described two components of innovative thinking. Bledow, Frese, Anderson, Erez, and Farr (2009a, p. 309), for example, divided the process into idea generation, on the one hand, and idea implementation, on the other. Ward and Kolomyts (2010, p. 94) identified generative and exploratory processes. Davila, Epstein, and Shelton (2012, p. xiv) distinguished between “value creation” and “value capture” (emphasis added). In fact, Anderson, Potocnik, and Zhou (2014) made it clear that the idea of a two-component process is now well established in the organizational literature. Turning to psychological thinking, in an influential discussion, Finke, Ward, and Smith (1992) distinguished between generating novelty and exploring it once it has been generated. Lonergan, Scott and Mumford (2004) concluded that this idea is now widely accepted in psychology too.

“Innovate or die” is the catchphrase for commercial organizations today, but the necessary discussion about innovation is hampered by the absence of a comprehensive set of concepts for conceptualizing the issues and terms for a systematic discussion of it. This book offers a reorientation: on the one hand, a switch of attention away from properties and processes in organizations to a focus on human actors; on the other hand, a turn to psychological research on creativity to work out the necessary conceptual framework. The use of creativity research to cast light on organizational issues leads to some looseness in distinguishing between creativity and innovation, but tolerance of fuzzy boundaries is a core aspect of both domains.

The book deconstructs the traditional four Ps approach to creativity by dividing the P of person into three domains: personal motivation, personal feelings/attitudes, personal attributes. Each domain is characterized by various behavioral dispositions, such as a disposition to react to a problem by generating novelty versus a disposition to fix what already exists. These behavioral dispositions are seen in this book not as static properties that people either possess or do not, but as styles or even habits that provide favorable (or unfavorable) personal prerequisites for innovation and can be learned or developed with the help of, among other things, appropriate leadership from managers. Thus, this book provides highly differentiated insights into best leadership practice in guiding and developing the disposition to innovate in individual members of an organization. In addition, the traditional P of product is made more specific to innovation by applying the usefulness imperative: In the case of innovation, products must display commercial salience. The result is, in effect, a Six Ps model of innovation, although the six elements are referred to in this book as the building blocks of innovation.

The analysis deals with the paradoxes of innovation (such as simultaneous calls for innovation and rejection of innovation) in the society as a whole, in the organizational environment, and within individual people, as well as conflicting conclusions about what kinds of action promote innovation. This is done by dividing the process of generation and implementation of novelty into phases and working out the relationship between the building blocks and the phases.

Although it was not directly inspired by him, this book has taken up an issue raised by Nussbaum (2013, p. 234) when he argued that “we need to switch from efficiency to creativity models” (emphasis added). In essence, this is what this book has done. It has drawn attention to a number of shortcomings or weaknesses in existing ways of conceptualizing innovation and has proposed a shift in focus to a more proactive and dynamic approach based on creativity theory. An overview of the kinds of shortcoming in current theorizing about innovation that are addressed in this book is presented in Table 10.1.

What Is the Practical Problem?

The practical problem has been stated clearly by a number of authors. In a nutshell, overwhelming lip service is given to the importance of innovation summarized in Chapter 1 and the litany of benefits it is thought to bring (see, for example, Table 1.1), but as Nussbaum (2013, p. 234) put it, it is “shunted to the periphery.” Such failure to innovate is now recognized as a matter of organizational life or death. The issue that thus arises is why firms choose to fiddle while Rome burns.

This book has shown that the problem has its roots in the three components of the system of which innovation is the outcome: the personal environment (see Chapter 4), the organizational environment, and the social environment (see Chapter 5). All three environments are marked by characteristics that support innovation, to be sure, but they are also marked by other characteristics that act as blockers of innovation (see Chapter 5). One blocker that cuts across environments is the absence of a clear understanding of the process of generation and implementation of effective novelty, for instance, equating the process with unfettered divergent thinking (see Chapter 2) or with something approaching divine inspiration. Another blocker is the inability of individual people, organizations, and societies to tolerate more than a limited amount of uncertainty or of risk (see Chapters 5 and 6, for example), whereas the essence of innovation is creating uncertainty, and one of its major drawbacks is that it is a risky business.