External Cooperation for Creative Problem-Solving

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in economic growth, innovation, and job creation. However, they face significant challenges, including limited financial resources, managerial constraints, technological limitations, and an increasingly competitive global market. These obstacles hinder their ability to innovate and sustain long-term growth. While creativity is widely recognized as a key driver of innovation, SMEs often struggle to implement structured creative processes that yield tangible business outcomes. A critical gap exists in understanding how structured and unstructured creativity impact SME innovation and competitiveness. Structured creativity follows a systematic, goal-oriented approach that aligns with business objectives, whereas unstructured creativity fosters spontaneous, unrestricted idea generation. Despite the potential benefits of both approaches, SMEs often lack the necessary frameworks, methodologies, and empirical insights to effectively integrate them into their business strategies. To address this gap, this chapter examines creativity from a theoretical perspective to establish a conceptual framework, offering a lens through which its dimensions can be explored (Amabile, 2020; Amabile et al., 1996; Castillo-Vergara & Pérez de Lema, 2022; Spencer et al., 2022). It focuses on distinguishing structured creativity from unstructured creativity, highlighting how predefined frameworks and methodologies guide individuals and organizations toward targeted creative outcomes. Structured creativity is a process-oriented, systematic, and organized approach based on rules and frameworks. Techniques such as brainstorming sessions, mind mapping, and design thinking fall under this category. This approach ensures goal-oriented creative efforts that address specific challenges while maintaining a level of predictability and reproducibility across different contexts. Additionally, structured creativity offers greater scalability, making it easier to implement across industries and business settings (Byrge & Hansen, 2015; Fisher et al., 2021; Macerauskiene & Turcinskaitė-Balciuniene, 2018). To illustrate the practical application of structured creativity, this study presents an empirical analysis of 15 SME cases from Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, within the 2017–2023 period. These cases demonstrate how structured creativity methodologies have been applied in various contexts. By bridging the gap between theory and practice, this chapter aims to explore the role of structured creativity in SMEs, analyze real-world cases, and examine how creativity-driven approaches enhance innovation, problem-solving, and adaptability in resource-constrained environments. Ultimately, this study provides actionable insights into how SMEs can leverage structured creativity for sustainable growth and competitive advantage.