Creativity from Many Angles
Upbeat, collaborative, and engaged.” That’s how Professor Teresa Amabile describes a gathering of 85 scholars and 15 business leaders held on the HBS campus in early December. The two-day Centennial conference, “Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future,” took an interdisciplinary approach to examining creativity, with perspectives from the fields of sociology, psychology, economics, and history.
Of 100 papers submitted for consideration, nine authors were asked to present their work, with topics ranging from “The Airplane as an Open Source Invention” to questions of legitimacy and identity in the emerging field of satellite radio.
A panel discussion moderated by HBS professor emeritus Jim Heskett that included Scott Cook (MBA ’76) of Intuit, Mark Fishman (AMP 163, 2002) of Novartis, Kim Malone Scott (MBA ’96) of Google, and Diego Rodriguez (MBA ’01) of IDEO kicked off the conference. “During the discussion, participants on the panel and in the audience used metaphors such as ‘gardener’ and ‘shepherd’ to describe the appropriate role of managers in supporting the creative process,” says Amabile, who served as cochair for the conference with HBS assistant professor Mukti Khaire. “This idea was referred to and expanded upon often throughout the conference.” Khaire noted that the issue of social and environmental concerns and the need to address these problems in a creative manner was also a frequent topic of engagement for participants.
A number of research questions were identified for future exploration by conference end. “There will be more work to understand failures, as well as successes, because most work on truly difficult problems and radically new ideas will fail,” Amabile remarks. “We can learn much from failure, yet managers and organizations don’t completely understand how to plan for and deal with it.” Amabile also cited the need for further understanding of the motives and incentives that drive people working at various stages of the creative process. “I also foresee more research on how to structure organizations so that managers can be facilitators of the collaborative processes that drive creativity, protect dissenters, and integrate opposing ideas,” she adds.
