Managing knowledge, creativity and innovation

The place and role of managing creativity in organizations appears as a growing concern amongst scholars as well as practitioners. The aim of this chapter is to situate and analyze how managing creativity should fit into the organizational framework orchestrated by the interactions between the management of knowledge and the management of innovation. In this contribution, we question the traditional view that places creativity at the preliminary stage of the innovation process. Following pioneering works on the management of creativity, we suggest in the following that managing creativity is equivalent to managing ideas, and argue that the main theoretical obstacle is that at the present stage ideas are mostly “black boxes” in innovation theories. In an effort to “open this black box”, we come to the suggestion that a major change of perspective is needed in management: instead of viewing the management of ideas as an initial stage of the innovation process, we propose an integrated framework where the processes of ideation and innovation are not sequential but coupled, and where these strategic interactions are mediated by knowledge-management processes. Such a change of perspective suggests drastic impacts on the ways to manage organizations, which are discussed in the conclusion of this chapter.