Creativity, Innovation, and Design Thinking in Organizations

This essay discusses the statement that successful creativity, innovation, and design thinking activities within an organization depend solely on the work of individual employees. It argues that creativity, innovation, and design thinking are influenced by various external factors, including culture, technology, and leadership structure. The essay explores the 5-step process of design thinking and highlights the importance of teamwork and diversity in fostering creativity and innovation. It also emphasizes the role of leaders in actively engaging employees and creating an enabling environment for creativity and innovation.

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Introduction
Creativity, innovation, and design thinking are most frequently used around the world. Most of
the managers agree that innovation and creativity are important in the long run, but many
struggles to realize it in their business. This essay is to discuss and evaluate the statement:
"successful, creativity, innovation and design thinking activities within the organization depend
on the work of individual employees only". My stance is that creativity, innovation and design
thinking does not rely on an individual. There are a few factors that will substantiate my stance
and they are using the 5 step process of design thinking.
Creativity, Innovation and Design Thinking
Design thinking is a structured technique that gives an answer based way to deal with handling
issues...
The stages are Empathic, problem definition, generating ideas, prototyping, and testing of
solutions
Innovation involves existence or modification of new ideas, creative thoughts, and imaginations
in the form of a method. Innovation is regularly deemed as the use of better solutions that meet
new necessities, unsaid needs, or existing business sector needs (Anderson, Potočnik &
Zhou,2014,p.1297). It is a process of advancement and transformation.
According to Von Stamm (2008, p.67), Innovation typically incorporates unique creation and
inventive use and characterizes it as age, confirmation, and acknowledgment of new thoughts,
items, service delivery, and procedures.
The design thinking principles utilized in both strategic manner and innovation ensures that the
success rate of creativity and innovation of employees drastically increases in organizations.
"Design thinking firms stand separated in their ability to participate in the errand of constantly
updating their business… to make progress in both innovation,creati9vity, and productivity—the
blend that delivers the most dominant focused edge.
It is evident that the individual employees in this particular manner can adversely design the way
they lead, manage, create and innovate.
Creativity is defined as the ability to make unique ideas and decisions that are vital for
development in order to solve a particular problem.
By definition the capacity to make something novel and proper, creativity is significant to the
entrepreneurship skills that sustain the companies through the help of individual employees who
ensure it reaches the global scale (Bos‐Brouwers, 2010, p.417). In argument Creativity was
viewed as unmanageable—excessively tricky and elusive to bind, Due to the fact that focusing
on it led to low immediate payoff as compared to improving execution, it has not been the deep
focus for all top managers' attention.
Supporting the statement
Currently, competition has turned into a game on which employee can generate the vital and
tremendous number of ideas hence the need for creativity scholars to carry out further research.

To help make the associations among both theoretical approaches and practice, researchers
designed a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business college, welcoming business pioneers from
organizations whose achievement relies upon inventiveness, for example, design consultancy
IDEO, innovation trend-setter E Ink, Google, and pharmaceutical pioneer Novartis. At the
program, researchers introduced their freshest and most critical research. , they united about 100
individuals who were profoundly worried about the operations of creativity in companies
. It was evident that creativity, innovation, and design thinking depended on various external
factors and the business environment in order to become successful (Johansson‐Sköldberg,
Woodilla, and Çetinkaya, 2013, p.99). Some of the factors that indicated that creativity should be
managed include culture, technology, ethical issues, and leadership structure.
The critical priority of leadership, in this case, is to actively engage the right individual
employees, to the right creative work and also at the required time horizon. There is empathic
stag of design thinking which engage various experts top address the area of concern, understand
employees' experiences and motivations.This engagement begins when leaders focus on the
responsibilities of the individual employees. Employees must, therefore, contribute to the
imagination as managers are not the sole source of creativity and innovative ideas.
Cook recounted the tale of an enlightening investigation of developments at Google: Its
organizers followed the advancement of thoughts that they had sponsored versus ideas that had
been executed in the positions without help from above, and found a higher achievement rate in
the last classification (Brown and Katz, 2011, p.381). Evidently, successful companies such as
Tesla provides most individual employees with enormous autonomy. The management argues
that the huge success results from employees own initiatives. This is through a combination of
other work ethics and personal behavior of employees. This creativity, innovation is not
depended on individual employee work only.
According to Liedtka, (2015, p.925) individuals doing profoundly creative work in numerous
fields—indicates that innovation is more probable when individuals of various disciplines,
foundations, and specialized expertise share their thinking ideas. Apart from the work of
workers, diversity also enhances creativity. Individual employees with an optimal level of
identity integration show a high degree of creativity when challenges need that they design the
distinct realms based on skills and knowledge (Davila, Epstein and Shelton, 2012, p.114). If
managers make employees to suppress their real identity they lead to constraints in creativity
sources. According to the prototype (design thinking stage), managers can encourage identity
integration by creating an enabling and conducive environment of teamwork and culture. This
makes individual employees be progressively creative.
In testing the solutions, they can also ensure diversity by looking outside the company for other
sources of creativity.
According to Kim Scott, who works at Google as a director of online marketing and sales for
AdSense and YouTube, creativity, design thinking and innovation also depends on vibrant,
continuous collaboration and a free flow of ideas.
Apart from a delegation of employees work, the leader's role is to highly map the process of
innovation and recognize the various existing different stages, knowledge, skills and
technological aid that each function need (Dul, and Ceylan, 2014,p.77).

Motivating the individual employees to perform at their best is key in creative work. A worker
who is uninspired to dwell his mind on a particular challenge has a low likelihood of bringing a
probable solution. These include rewards and promotions. However, the offering of rewards
should be regulated to avoid spurring creativity.
Countering the statement
As creativity, innovation and design thinking do not always work for an individual. When you
are in a company having diversity in a group we can come up with new ideas and solving
problems with the end user in mind. By using design thinking, we will be able to cut down on
resource timing. It also offers you the chance to use your creativity and innovation to solve the
problem that people face on a daily basis.
Choosing your teammate may not always be perfect, when there is not much option to choose
from the pool of candidate (Goetsch, and Davis, 2014, p.111). So the initiation startup
environment everyone needs to be involved in everything, so that everyone can slowly develop
an appropriate team culture, in order to move forward with the design thinking process.
A less number of individual employees have equal abilities in generating ideas and
commercialization. As a result of this, large corporations separate these two key functions.
Innovation will be successfully utilized by the workers who know how to market it to several
platforms. The management thus helps this responsibility through the limitation of the loss of
momentum of the ideas with proper timing and handling of transitions.
In enterprising settings, the existing idea originators are frequently compelled to take part in
business movement well past their comfort zones (Hammond, Neff, Farr, and Schwall, and Zhao,
2011, p.90).
Numerous designers do effectively develop their organizations (like Google). These
contradicting models feature the pressure that dependably exists in the administration of creative:
regardless of whether to round out their individual ranges of abilities or enable them to keep
running with their remarkable qualities and after that offset them with complementary assets.
One school of thought says that the general population nearest to the idea are best prepared to
decide—but only if the individual employees have a personal commitment to the success of the
idea and the available professional ramifications can be handled.
In a vivacious discourse of how thoughts ought to be winnowed, Johansson recommended that
the channels must be different. Except if the general population sitting in judgment speak to an
assortment of functions, fields, capacities, and perspectives, they are probably not going to settle
on shrewd decisions.
Conclusion
Therefore, I disagree with the statement "Successful creativity, innovation and design thinking
activities are only dependent on the work of individual employees."
Enable individual's employees to seek after their interests.
When individual employees are properly matched to an activity, providing them independence
holds less risk. Ideally, the existing creative individual employees would thus have the ability to
offset their own ideological innovative agendas (Herrmann, and Herrmann-Nehdi, 2015,p.77).In

a perfect world, innovative laborers would most likely set their very own motivation, in any
event to some extent. Employees should be motivated, trained and involved in decisions making
to ensure innovation. This what led Google to create Google scholar through helping employees
in design thinking as a team.
The way that inventive specialists are inherently propelled does not imply that directors' conduct
has no effect. A decent pioneer can do a lot to test and move innovative work in advancement
Individuals are profoundly sensitive to the board's commitment with and frame of mind toward
an undertaking. "The manner by which a pioneer makes an inquiry can move a group very
emphatically
Be an appreciative audience.
Manager's behavior makes a huge difference in the fact that the creative individual employees
are intrinsically motivated (Hobday, Boddington, and Grantham, 2011,p.15). The creativity and
design thinking of employees are largely attuned and depended on managements' work of
engagement, behavior, and attitude towards work.
The managers must embrace the certainty of failure and d decrease it in order to ensure that
workers are creative and innovative. This improves creative problem-solving approaches, team
working and hence increased companies performance.

References
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Davila, T., Epstein, M., and Shelton, R., 2012. Making innovation work: How to manage it,
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