WGU C203 Ch. 11 Creativity, Innovation, and Leadership

Additional Leadership Initiatives that Enhance Innovation:

1. emphasize transformational leadership; 2. continually pursue innovation; 3. take risks and encourage risk taking; 4. emphasize collaboration; 5. avoid innovation for its own sake; 6. use loose-tight leadership; 7. integrate development and production; 8. recognize hidden opportunities in flops.

Establishing a climate conducive to creative problem solving:

1. hire creative people from the outside and identify creative people from within, 2. provide intellectual challenge, 3. empower workers and allow them freedom to choose their own method, 4. supply the right resources, 5. design work groups effectively, 6. have supervisors encourage creative workers, 7. give organizational support for creativity and explain how innovation improves performance, 8. have favorable exchanges with creative workers, and give financial rewards for innovation.

Creative Process

1. opportunity or problem recognition; 2. immersion (the individual becomes immersed in the idea); 3. incubation (the idea simmers); 4. insight (a solution surfaces); and 5. verification and application (the person supports and implements the idea).

Self-help techniques to enhance creative problem solving:

1. practicing creativity-enhancing exercises, 2. staying alert to opportunities, 3. maintaining enthusiasm and being happy, 4. maintaining and using a systematic place for recording ideas, 5. playing the roles of explorer, artist, judge, and lawyer, and 6. engaging in appropriate physical exercise.

Pet Peeve Technique

A method of brainstorming in which a group identifies all the possible complaints others might have about the group's organizational unit.

Kitchen for the Mind

A space designed to nurture creativity.

Experience of the Flow Characteristic

An experience so engrossing and enjoyable that the task becomes worth doing for its own sake, regardless of the external consequences.

Knowledge Characteristic

Creative problem solving requires a broad background of information, including facts and observations. It provides the building blocks for generating and combining ideas.

Brainstorming:

Creative thinking that is enhanced by systematically collecting fresh ideas and goals. A variation of brainstorming is extreme thinking.

Cognitive Characteristic

Intellectual abilities comprise such abilities as general intelligence and abstract reasoning.

Personality Characteristic

Non-cognitive aspects of an individual heavily influence creative problem solving. Creative people tend to have a positive self-image without being blindly self-confident. But because they are reasonably self-confident, they are able to cope with criticism of their ideas, and they can tolerate the isolation necessary for developing ideas.

Passion for the Task Characteristic

People will be at their creative best when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself—and not by external pressures.

Managing Creative Workers:

Provide excellent tools and resources, give creative people flexibility, turn down ideas gently, and employ creative people to manage and evaluate creative workers.

Traditional Thinking

Refers to a standard and frequent way of finding a solution to a problem. Creative problem solving requires an ability to overcome this.

Innovation

The process of creating new ideas and their implementation.

Creativity

The production of novel and useful ideas.

Distinguishing Characteristics of Creative People:

knowledge, cognitive abilities, personality, passion for the task, and the experience of flow.