Chapter 8 : Managing creativity in the firm: the fuzzy front end of innovation and dynamic capabilities

The literature on innovation, particularly with regard to new product development, explores how fi rms manage their innovation process, the organization of their material, their fi nancial and human resources, the tools they use, as well as the culture and leadership in place. To a large extent, this literature, which is essentially focused on the conditions of development of new processes and new products, pays only marginal attention to the emergence and generation of the creative ideas from which the innovation processes are undertaken. Creativity is generally confi ned to the black box of R&D which is supposed to produce new ideas with an innovative potential, or in the blind spot of what is happening before the R&D process takes shape. The focus is on the output of the exploration phases of fi rms, rather than on the processes within, before and around the R&D box. The processes of formation of ideas, the history of their emergence, the conditions of their growth and the complex routes of their transformation into potential new products are largely untold (e.g., Hansen and Birkinshaw, 2007 ). What really and essentially matters seems to be the selection process between competing ideas that will lead to new innovative processes and products.