Organizational Creativity versus Vested Interests: The Role of Academic Entrepreneurs in the Emergence of Oxbridge Business Schools

As Amabile rightly put it when considering all the organizations she had studied and worked with, "creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported" (Amabile, 1998). Organizational creativity is even more likely to be killed when an innovative institutional logic seeks to emerge without a corresponding institution, namely within a conservative institution based on strong vested interests. Embedded in a desire for institutional change, ‘change agents' (Weik, 2011), beyond being individually creative have to orchestrate organizational creativity in order to turn their new idea into an institutionalised innovation. Based on this organizational paradox, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, it contributes to the existing literature dealing with entrepreneurial innovation and organizational creativity. In particular, it seeks to outline which kind of managerial practices foster creativity in a particularly conservative and inert environment. Second, it sheds light on an original comparative case study – the role of organizational creativity in the emergence and institutionalisation of Oxford and Cambridge business schools – that has been underexplored before and that relies on primary data. Based on a historical perspective of everyday organizational life and practices, this research emphasises the role of academic entrepreneurs in organizational changes through the legitimatization of organizational creativity.