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Individual, group, and organizational characteristics leading to greater potential for innovation
Editor’s Note: The following was published in TechTrends as the 2013 Invited Paper/Presentation to the Research & Theory Division of AECT, available on Springer here.
West, R. E. (2014). Communities of innovation: Individual, group, and organizational characteristics leading to greater potential for innovation. TechTrends, 58(5), 53–61. doi: 10.1007/s11528-014-0786-x
Video Abstract
Introduction
In 1950, in a memorable presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Guilford chided his colleagues for the period’s lack of research on creativity, noting that only 0.2% of published articles in Psychology Abstracts had discussed creativity. He then made a prescient prediction about the future, with the development of computers, which he called “thinking machines”:
[It will] be necessary to develop an economic order in which sufficient employment and wage earning would still be available . . . eventually about the only economic value of brains left would be in the creative thinking of which they are capable. (p. 36)
The time that Guilford envisioned is quickly becoming the present, when the combination of powerful computers and the ability to network these computers through the Internet has created a different kind of employment marketplace, one where employees are being expected to produce innovations, where knowledge is not managed but created (Howkins, 2002; Sawyer, 2006a; Tepper, 2010). As a sign of the times, patents granted in the United States have risen from about 49,000 in 1963 to over 276,000 in 2012 (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 2012). Patent filings are, of course, not a perfect measure of innovation for many reasons, but they reflect the current stress for innovation in business and industry.
Creativity in Education
Responding to this market need, educational organizations find it increasingly critical to develop creativity in their students. For example, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has designated innovation as one of the skills students need (see http://www.p21.org/about-us/p21-framework/60). Livingston (2010) argued, “Higher education needs to use its natural resources in ways that develop content knowledge and skills in a culture infused at new levels by investigation, cooperation, connection, integration, and synthesis. Creativity is necessary to accomplish this goal” (p. 59).
How are we doing at teaching this critical capability? Not as well as we perhaps should be. Berland (2012) surveyed 1,000 adult working college graduates in the United States and found that 78% felt creativity to be important to their current career, and 82% wished they had been more exposed to creative thinking in school. In addition, 88% felt creativity should be integrated into university curricula, with 71% thinking it should be a class in itself. Particularly interesting is the work done by Kyung Hee Kim, who in 2011 published