Conclusion: Managing Organizational Creativity

The final chapter of this book will examine some of the practical consequences of the topics discussed in the first and second parts of the book. In the first part of the book, the literature on organizational creativity was explored in terms of its theoretical consistency, methodology and epistemological considerations. The second part of the book pointed to issues such as the influence of technology, leadership and cognition as areas that the organizational creativity literature could make more explicit reference to. In summary, the first two chapters of the book provided a comprehensive critical review of the organization learning literature qua theoretical field and a subdiscipline within organization theory and management studies. In this last chapter, we will take the consequences of these theoretical concerns into account when examining the practices of organizational creativity management. The main source of empirical illustration and observations is the pharmaceutical industry while there are a few additional studies and examples in the literature that are referenced. In this chapter, we draw on Peter Drucker’s classic text The Practice of Management, first published in 1955. In this book, Drucker emphasizes the ‘creative’ components of management and defines management in more entrepreneurial terms than do the contributors to the leadership discourse.