Creativity, Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship in Organizations

This report explores the factors that influence creativity, innovation and change management in an organization. It recommends that organizations should provide enough financial resources and the required moral support to its members to enable the spirit of creativity and innovativeness to thrive.

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CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND CORPORATE ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN
ORGANIZATIONS
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................3
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Analysis...........................................................................................................................................5
Conclusions......................................................................................................................................9
Recommendations..........................................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................13

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Executive Summary
This report was initiated with an aim of finding ways on how Matchbox Architect
company can effectively plan and execute organizational systems that promote and sustain
creativity, innovation and corporate entrepreneurship. Through analyzation of past academic
literature and practitioner-orientated materials, this research explores the factors that influence
creativity, innovation and change management in an organization.
This study draws its attention to the challenges created by the rapid growth of
entrepreneurship globally and how best to address this challenges through innovations and
management of change in organizations. Increased competition at the world economic market
has led to the increased demand for creative ways to produce superior quality products so as to
counter competition. This has affected the organization's systems and structures calling for more
innovative ways to manage production and the organization's most valuable asset(labor).
Workers in an organization require the organization to provide a creativity conducive climate to
allow them to come up with ideas that will lead to innovations.
Huge workloads and workplace pressures all limits the employee's ability to come up
with and execute creative ideas. On the other hand, freedom and space for experimentation of the
employee's ideas lead to innovations that stir the organization at an advantaged position when it
comes to the production of goods or services. This research study recommends that organizations
such as MBA company should provide enough financial resources and the required moral
support to its members to enable the spirit of creativity and innovativeness to thrive. The moral
support may be in form of less controlled supervision at workplace, manageable workloads and
moderately challenging tasks and goals.
The company should draft a performance appraisal policy that recognizes and rewards
members who take up initiatives involving huge risks and see to it that these initiatives are
implemented to the latter for the betterment of the company.
Introduction
Innovation in the business world refers to the end result of a combination of production activities
that make use of creative ideas to generate more value from a process (Serrat, 2017). Innovation
is a product of the creation and implementation of new ideas. With increased levels of
entrepreneurship worldwide, organizations are being faced with new challenges that can only be

Creativity and Innovation4
solved by improving the organizations' creativity and innovativeness (Sarooghi,
Libaers&Burkemper, 2015). Creativity in an organization guarantees a steady and efficient
production of quality goods and services while innovativeness ensures that the organization is
well placed in the industry competition index. The organization has to keep up with the hard task
of balancing the need to produce quality goods and services and the need to innovate new ways
of production to match the market trends and new customer demands.
Although creativity has been used to run businesses before, it hasn't been synchronized
fully with the top echelons of the business management. Creativity is an important aspect when
venturing into entrepreneurship. It takes creativity to start an enterprise and more creativity to
sustain the enterprise. Increased competition in the business world has led to an increased need
for creativity. This has been brought about by the need to out-shine competitors through
innovating new methods of producing goods and services. The senior executives in an
organization are therefore being required to come up with new ideas to run the organization
(Ahlin, Drnovšek&Hisrich, 2014).
Creativity in any organization is enhanced by taking into consideration the factors that
influence creativity in an organization. These factors include; organizational support and
supervisory encouragement, group relationships, risk-taking, challenging tasks and goals,
freedom and resources availed, and workload pressure (Anderson, Potočnik& Zhou, 2014).
These factors are intertwined with each other in the sense that the operationalization of one
factor is dependent on the adherence to another. For instance, the minimization or elimination of
workload pressures is dependent on good supervisory and organization support.
The increase in market reach, the number of employees, and the operation base of an
organization poses a new set of challenges. Innovation becomes a particular task to achieve due
to the bulk of handling and coordinating a big group of employees and organization operations.
However, through this growth, the operations in an organization are improved with the
organization now being able to control competition, penetrate new markets, produce diverse
products and control a bigger market share. The organization is also able to motivate its
employees by providing a conducive working environment for carrier growth (Han, Jung &Joo,
2015).
This study aims to explore how organizations can implement and sustain structures and
systems that guarantees and promotes creativity and innovation, and corporate entrepreneurship.

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The study will touch on the factors that influence creativity and innovation in an organization
and how well to control these factors so as to optimize production in an organization. Creation
and implementation of new ideas in an organization lead to more innovative ways of production.
This in return leads to the achievement of desired organization production and operations
changes.
Analysis
An organization's positive progress depends on the ability of its systems and structures to
create and implement new ideas (Kerr, 2015). When a company employs the generated
knowledge in the production of its goods or services, the desired innovation is achieved. This
leads to the production of superior products that resultantly ensure market dominance. The secret
to success in an organization dependent on creativity is to invest in intellectual capital. Through
working groups, the organization should be able to inter-exchange the individual knowledge of
its employees at different organizational levels. This ensures that the organization has the right
key competencies required to produce superior products or services.
Creativity at the organization level entails generation of a useful idea, process, valuable
product or service by a group of individuals working cohesively in a complex set up. Creativity
provides a competitive advantage to the organization over the other organizations in the market
industry. For optimum creativity to be achieved in an organization, individual level and
organization level creativity should be attained. Each individual member in the organization
must be willing and be able to engage in innovative work behaviors. This will require each
individual member to come up with new ideas, and develop new technologies that will improve
the process of production. The organization should in return improve the climate for creativity
and innovation by minimizing the workload pressures and impediments while as well as
increasing resources and freedom to its members (Wilson, 2018).
In order to meet the requirements of innovative management, an organization should
commit investment resources to its members. This inspires the members to be imaginative in
their thinking thereby creating new ideas that ultimately lead to innovation. However, to
accomplish this, the organization requires a corporate strategy to cultivate an innovative culture.
With the right resources at the disposal of the members in an organization, the transformation of
ideas into innovative concepts and implementation of these concepts is achieved. This resources

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should be scattered throughout the organization instead of centralizing them in a single
department (Amabile& Pratt, 2016).
Lack of freedom within an organization's limits the member's creative thinking abilities
(Jones & Jones, 2013). The members thinking is limited to the usual bare minimums due to the
fear of breaking the governing organizations' harsh rules and regulations. However, to unleash
and inspire creative thinking in an organization, members of the organization should be allowed
to put their novel ideas into practice. Hierarchical imposition should be abolished and replaced
with a supervised democratic space to allow members some sense of freedom when executing
their daily tasks.
The organization structure and culture form the vital support structure in the realization
of organization innovativeness and creativity (Hogan &Coote, 2014). Complex, tedious
hierarchies of management and centralized decision making hinders innovation. The
diversification of the organization process and expansion of the space for individual expression
speeds up innovation. For instance, information provided by more experienced and diversified
members leads to better insights and perspectives. On the other hand, flexible and open
structures provide an effective and efficient channel of communication within the organization.
Members of an organization require psychological safety assurance before undertaking
interpersonal risks (Carmeli et al, 2014). Reduced risks lead to an increased degree of job
involvement and better teamwork. This in return yields to more initiative taking habits leading to
innovation. Members of an organization with initiative taking habits possess an active approach
to work. This class of members is able to work out their creative ideas up to the implementation
phase (García-Granero et al, 2015). The organization should, however, put into place an
incentive-based policy system to reward and encourage initiative taking habits to enable and
sustain continuity of this norm.
The organization through its leadership should encourage the spirit of creativity by
cultivating creativity in the minds of its members (Neves, &Eisenberger, 2014). The leadership
should control their expectations for individuals and groups performance. Expecting more in a
short period of time leaves the members with no option but to use the usual old ways in the
execution of their mandate. However, giving more time to the employees brings out the best in
their creativity thereby allowing the organization to leap on the long-term benefits of innovation.
It is also important for the organization to allow some room for failure to its members. The fear

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of failure kills creativity. It's therefore important for the organization to allow some space for its
employees to make and correct their mistakes.
A group work is an arrangement where several individuals interdependently work
together to achieve a common set of goals. In a group arrangement, each member is held
accountable for the collective outcome of the job undertaken by the group (Dutton, &Ragins,
2017). Past studies indicate that members in an organization are more creative when working on
collective jobs under supportive supervision rather than lighter jobs under controlled supervision.
Although members in a group are required to possess creative skills, team creativity as a result of
individual member's interaction forms the bedrock for innovation in a group relationship.
Collective creativeness is dependent on team dynamics, member creative skills and organization
solutions (Fay et al., 2014).
The antecedents of creativity and group innovation are; cohesiveness, good leadership,
and group longevity. When leadership is collaborative and democratic the number of creative
outcomes is high. An organic group structure coupled with individuals drawn from diverse
functional backgrounds yields the same positive results too. Past research on organization
creativity theorizes that work practices affect individual and group creativity. Amabile's past
research studies suggest that workload pressure limits members' creativity more so when the
pressure is seen to be imposed externally (Im, 2013). The perception that an external player is
imposing a huge workload on a group or individual undermines creativity.
From Amabile's perspective, creativity is dependent on intrinsic motivation, level of
expertise and skills. The level of expertise is measured using the technical ability and knowledge
that an individual employs when handling tasks. As the workload for an individual increase the
creativity diminishes. However, most managers assume that huge workload is an indicator of
employee performance output (Yoshida, 2014) It’s therefore, the responsibility of the
organization management to uncover the organization's work practices that drive huge
workloads. Increase in workloads can be attributed to interruptions, changes in work priority,
crisis-driven workplace atmosphere, ambiguity, and lack of coordination of ideas and opinions.
By identifying work practices and structures that lead to huge workloads, organizations can
adopt a workplace system mechanism that picks on the desired behaviors rather than the easily
measurable behaviors.

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Organization support influences both an individual level and group level performance
(Brettel, Chomik& Flatten, 2015). The organization context under which a team or individual
operates can either be facilitative or constraining. Performance appraisals and rewards are
designed in such a manner that collaborative tasks and collective achievement of team goals are
not rewarded. An ideal human resource management system should be guided by a clear strategy
in controlling the hiring of employees and assisting the employees to realize their full potential.
An effective human resource management system should be able to recruit, induct and manage
the performance of individuals.
The human resource systems provide supervisory encouragement by signaling to
employees the work behaviors that are valuable to the organization through training and
performance appraisals. The HRM systems also help the individuals and groups generate more
innovative ideas by stipulating to the employees the innovations and ideas conversant with the
organization's goals and objectives. This helps the employees to focus on the ideas and
innovations relevant to the organization's vision and strategy. A weak human resource
management system slows or stops individuals and groups in an organization from achieving
their goals thereby preventing the organization from meeting its goals too (Arnaud &Wasieleski,
2014).
Team reflexivity in an organization helps teams to achieve their optimum potential. For
instance, the diversification of opinions and ideas in a group leads to innovativeness (Schippers
et al, 2015). The diverse skills, educational and functional background of members in a group
accounts for the high level of innovation. However, this diversity requires a cognitive effort from
the members in a group to yield positive results. Lack of shared mental models occasioned by
lack of similarity in opinions and perception can be detrimental to the organization's bid of
achieving innovativeness. Organizational reflexivity helps in reconciling the divergent opinions
and perspectives before action can be undertaken.
The degree of innovation at different organization's work groups level differ. This
difference can be attributed to the hierarchical disparities between the two and the knowledge
base diversity of the two groups (Hoch, 2013). Although interactions and integrations in both
levels of work groups lead to innovation, the management level workgroups are placed in a
better position to create new ideas and implement them by resourcing these ideas and initiating
the implementation process. However, the implementation of this ideas highly depends on the

Creativity and Innovation9
production level groups. Therefore, its essential for the two organizational group levels to work
harmoniously and coherently so as to achieve an organization's goals.
Ambidexterity refers to the ability to simultaneously refine the knowledge available
while creating new knowledge to make up for the deficits identified during the execution of tasks
(Turner, Swart and Maylor, 2013). Organizations can implement ambidexterity strategies using
existing support groups in the organization by allocating standard operations to these groups.
One workgroup may major on exploitation while the other focuses on exploration. The outcomes
obtained at each workgroup is thereafter correlated at the organizational group level. However,
for ambidexterity mechanisms to succeed in an organization, intellectual capital and organization
capital resources are of the essence. The organization should provide knowledge resources to
groups and individuals to ensure that the benefits of ambidexterity have been realized.
Creativity can be defined as the end product of a person's behavior in a given situation
(Paulsen, 2013). The situation might be in form of a social or a contextual trigger that leads to
creativity. The creative behaviors of members in an organization involve an interaction between
an individual or group members in a complex situation. This interaction might be influenced by
past events or current situation conditions. Group creativity behavior is realized when the overall
of all individual creative behaviors is harmonized into a single unit. On the other hand,
organizational creativity is derived from the creative outputs of its composite groups and the
contextual factors such as organization performance appraisal system, resources available and
the organization culture.
Creativity may be seen as the ability to point out causes or coming up with explanations
for different organization situations. The individual cognitive ability and style influence the
integration of the individual differences in a group context. An intrinsic motivation of individuals
and groups within an organization helps in attaining individual and group self-regulation.
Members are able to take initiative and work under minimal controlled supervision. However,
performance evaluations and appraisals systems may affect intrinsic motivation by shifting the
attention away from the heuristic characteristics of creative tasks to the technical aspect of
performing a task. Rewards given to individuals after performing routine tasks motivates the
individual while rewards given to an individual for agreeing to carry out a task doesn't meet its
objective (Tyler &Blader, 2013).

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Conclusions
For an organization to keep up with the tight competition characterizing the global
economy, it is important for it to provide an environment that encourages employees to be
creative and innovative (Jaiswal&Dhar, 2015). Successful organizations have been found to be
using a corporate entrepreneurship strategy to leverage entrepreneurial opportunities geared
towards growth and discovering more innovations. The organization should, therefore, strive to
produce innovative goods or services, provide a conducive contextual environment for its
members, provide adequate resources to its members, and lastly transform ideas generated by
individual and groups into innovations (Kuratko, Hornsby &Covin, 2014).
Although creativity is considered as a natural trait, skills and abilities acquired from
training and interaction of members in work groups contribute to the innovation and
implementation process (Elnaga, & Imran, 2013). The organization should therefore not only
focus on individual member's natural creative abilities but nature a creative workforce through
inductions, pieces of training and performance rewards. The level of creativity is not necessarily
dependent on the intelligence quantum of an individual but rather on the level of individual
interest of the said member. The organization should cultivate an enabling environment by
supporting systems that increase members' interest in innovation.
Innovation is the bedrock of corporate entrepreneurship strategy. Therefore, the
organization should manage internal changes and conflicts as well as external competition while
still matching customer's preferences in the goods or services produced (Dogan&Nilhun, 2015).
The management of an organization can highly benefit from the corporate entrepreneurship
strategy. It becomes easier to fairly allocate resources to different work groups, and individuals
and to manage these resources. The management of an organization is also able to track the
interest level of members and determine where there is a deficit of entrepreneurial interest.
Change is an important aspect of any organization that seeks to scale its growth (Hon,
Bloom &Crant, 2014). An organization must gauge its strategy with the prevailing organization
situation and environment. This is to make sure that its strategy is always geared towards
achieving its goals and objectives. If the strategy appears to be leading the organization in the
wrong direction, then the management should institute and implement change in the
organization's systems. The organization should involve its members in the implementation of

Creativity and Innovation11
the innovations realized. This will help the members to familiarize themselves with the changes
at an earlier manageable stage as opposed to last minute rush.
The management of an organization should provide espoused as well as enacted support
to its members. The top leadership should encourage norms that lead to risk-taking and creativity
amongst its members. Resources should be committed to high-risk innovations generated by
members as a way of appreciating their hard work. It is important for the groups that come up
with innovative ideas to be involved in the implementation process. The leadership of an
organization should entertain a certain degree of experimentation of group and individual ideas
as well as reward exemplary performance. This motivates the members to be even more creative
and to face head-on risky initiatives in the future (Tsai et al, 2015).
Communication is the primary key ingredient in the success of an organization. A
creative climate requires positive interpersonal exchanges between individuals or members in a
group (Boies, Fiset& Gill, 2015). When members experience a sense of togetherness, the desire
to achieve organization goals becomes mutual and catalyzed. The individual and group creativity
abilities are improved. Good communication also enhances the intellectual debate among
members in an organization. This ensures that members are free and confident to air their
creative ideas instead of sticking to the usual old tactics of solving problems and addressing
causes.
Recommendations
Creativity and innovation at MBA can be supported and promoted at a long-term scale
through; keeping up with competition at the global market, nurturing new skills and talents,
drafting, adopting and implementing a corporate entrepreneurship strategy, managing and
accommodating organizational changes, providing both technical and psychological support to
MBA'S employees, and enhancing effective communication strategy within the company.
Match Box Architects company through its production department should produce
superior quality house designs and construction services to its clients to ensure that they
eliminate or reduce competition. This can only be achieved by allocating the right financial and
moral resources to its production teams, giving ample time to its production team to deliver as
per the customer's preference and time to reflect on the possibility of producing even more
improved services and products.

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The company management should formulate and oversee the implementation of its
corporate enterprise strategy. This strategy should factor in mechanisms to address both internal
and external changes in the company. External changes involve changes in government
regulations while internal changes may be changes brought about by innovations made in the
company's system of governance. Through the strategy, the company will be able to track the
level of entrepreneurial interest of its members as well as design a formula for allocating
resources to individuals, and group levels.
The top leadership at MBA company should lead by example. They should accord all
members of the company an opportunity to air their views and opinions free of prejudice.
Subordinates should feel free and confident to speak their minds without fear of being
disregarded. The employees of the company should be rewarded for a job well done regularly to
boost their morale at work. The management of MBA should come up with mechanisms that
enhance inter-personal exchanges between groups and individuals in the company's activities.

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