Deconstracting creativity: entrepreenurs, individual talents, and social networks

Creativity stays at the foundation of all acts of human invention, discovery, and creation. Acts of creativity may involve new scientifi c discoveries, technological applications, or novel organizational models, all representing new forms of organizing and managing resources. Creativity is embodied in science, management, arts, and culture. Each creative act embodies immaterial value, consisting of symbols, artifacts, and systems of beliefs, which are embedded in and evaluated from cultural or aesthetic systems of reference (Hartley, 2005). Creativity does not have a dichotomist dimension (creative versus noncreative). Rather, it can be judged along a continuum system of evaluation that is sensible to the personal preferences, the social contexts, the historical time, and the countryspecifi c culture (Veiga de França & Ono, 2007). Creativity is intimately tied to knowledge, resulting from and contributing to knowledge-based social interactions between innovation-oriented individuals, in more or less tightly bounded communities of specialists and nonspecialists. Considered as a characteristic of the individual, creativity represents an inexplicable (even spiritual) component of artistic practice (Gahan, Minahan, & Glow, 2007), or as an act of insight pertaining to a creative process, which ends up with new ideas (Staber, 2008). In this chapter, section 2 discusses the concept of creativity. Section 3 addresses the issue of collective creativity and put in evidence the passage from individual to collective creativity. In section 4, the focus is on describing and comparing real cases of creativity. Following a multiple case-study approach (Yin, 1981, 2003), four qualitative case studies are presented. In these four case studies the analysis of creativity: (a) matches a social process of collective creativity and awareness towards the “green paradigm” directing the pace of innovation (see the evolution of wind technologies in Denmark); (b) sustains a marketing strategy based on the involvement of the fi rm in the sponsoring of music events and in the creation of a virtual web community, involving clients and artists (Diesel case); (c) gives rise to Belussi_Staber 2nd pages_rev.indd 3 4/21/2011 11:04:26 AM 4 F. Belussi T&F Proofs: Not For Distribution new products, which contain immaterial value imposing a novel consumer identity; and which substitutes existing services creating a new market nice, e.g., the market of beauty (L’Oréal with its products for hair treatment); (d) explores the supply and the demand of new technologies within a virtual business market, based on web interactions (the InnoCentive case).