This study has two major purposes. The first of these is to formulate a theoretical model which 1) provides an ontological and psychological framework for the concept of creativity, and 2) if non-contradictory empirical data are produced, provides a philosophic and psychological guide to effective action relevant to the development of creative skill. The second major purpose is to formulate and test a problem and hypotheses which would provide some empirical evidence of the explanatory adequacy of the model, and outside the scope of theoretical material, to produce data of general interest to any reader regardless of his theoretical orientation.

It is evident that educators and industrial psychologists alike recognize the effect that situational climate may have upon creative production. The present study will, hopefully, contribute some useful information leading to a better definition of the relationship between anxiety and creative production, which will lead in time to suggestions regarding the essential conditions of an optimum creative climate. The exploration of some of the aspects involved in situational climates is the point of departure for the present study.

Innovation laboratories are environments especially designed for carrying out the innovation process. They are an example of a new kind of organisational structure that has emerged as a managerial response to challenges associated with organisational dynamic capability development. Using a mixed-method approach, this thesis attempts to create an understanding for the challenges and opportunities that exist in the management of an innovation laboratory, both on a level of organisational innovation and of individual creativity. The componential model of creativity and innovation in organisations is used as a framework for analysis of an innovation laboratory in the case company, the tech consultancy firm Semcon. The results confirm that there is a lack of clarity in the conceptualisation of innovation labs. Some important findings are that the implementation of an innovation laboratory could in itself be seen as an opportunity, but that acting in the borderland between the objectives of profitability and creativity could prove a challenge. A challenge may also lie in maintaining a realistic view of the actual abilities of the innovation laboratory. Cross-functional collaboration between consultants seems to bring opportunities in that it may contribute to knowledge creation and transfer within the firm, but there is a challenge in that teams are in need of leaders with skills in creativity management and agile project management, but also technical expertise. A general conclusion for managing innovation laboratories is that they need enough resources to have room for mistakes. The findings have implications for the management of existing innovation laboratories and those in the planning.

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Le travail de recherche qui suit vise à l’obtention d’une méthodologie opératoire propre à faire évoluer la culture organisationnelle d’une firme dans le domaine de l’activité inventive, en particulier en opérant un transfert culturel à partir du monde académique. Il s’agit de construire un procédé de recueil et d’explicitation des connaissances inventives ayant abouti à une conception nouvelle, puis à exploiter en interne les résultats de ce premier procédé en appliquant ceux-ci à un second procédé ayant la dimension d’un apprentissage organisationnel. Le dispositif expérimental présenté a visé à réaliser la validation des hypothèses formulées. L’étude de cas dans notre organisation a permis de concrétiser, sur la base du bilan de l’évolution temporelle du patrimoine intellectuel inventif, l’approche de la créativité stimulée par les connaissances dans un cadre limité à trois domaines de connaissance et où l’on vise une innovation incrémentale. Ce mécanisme met en jeu individuellement et collégialement un ensemble d’acteurs impliqués dans l’inventaire préalable du patrimoine intellectuel inventif et dans son évolution stratégique au sens de l’organisation. En outre, ce travail introduit une vision peu commune de l’activité de R & T d’une organisation industrielle, vision où l’approche par la connaissance non contextuelle se substitue aux approches contextuelles usuelles par produits et services. Cette méthodologie opératoire s’appuie sur une approche conceptuelle de la créativité appliquée à la création de connaissances inventives. Cette création de connaissances est interprétée comme une mutation épistémologique déclenchée par la nature profondément paradoxale de la créativité. Le (futur) créateur doit porter en lui l’essence d’une oeuvre constituant la future création, la créativité lui permettant d’identifier cette essence par abstraction et l’inventivité lui permettant de donner performativement une Forme à cette abstraction. La mise au jour de liens puissamment opératoires entre des domaines peu mis en regard jusqu’alors, ceux de la Créativité/Inventivité, du Patrimoine Intellectuel et de l’Ingénierie des Connaissances fournit de solides fondations à l’approche conceptuelle de la création de connaissances inventives, ainsi qu’à de nombreuses perspectives de recherches supplémentaires. / The following research work aims at getting an operational methodology able to make firm’s organizational culture progress in the inventive activity field, especially through a cultural transfer from academic world. The point is first building a process gathering and making explicit inventive knowledge which succeeded in a new design. Then, results coming out of this first process are applied to a second process featuring organizational learning. We described an experimental plan dedicated to the validation of the research hypotheses that we formulated. The case study based on our own organization was the opportunity to get a first operational validation of Knowledge-based innovation method applied to a 3-knowledge domain configuration for incremental innovation. Creativity stimulation was operated through the time-evolution synthesis of intangible inventive intellectual corpus. This mechanism both individually and collectively involves numerous actors already solicited for the preliminary inventory of inventive intellectual corpus and for its strategic evolution according to the firm.Moreover, this work brings an usual view on industrial R & T activity, where non contextual knowledge approach is substituted to conventional contextual approach bases on products. This operational methodology is based on a conceptual approach of creativity applied to the generation of inventive knowledge, which is seen as an epistemological mutation triggered by the most paradoxical nature of creativity. The (future) creator must house in himself the essence of intellectual work which will be the future creation: creativity allows him to identify this essence by abstraction and inventivity allows him to performatively give a Form to this abstraction. By revealing strongly operative links between poorly linked domains(Creativity/Inventivity, Intellectual Corpus, Knowledge Management), solid foundations are brought to the conceptual approach of inventive knowledge generation and to numerous perspectives of extra research.

Supporting creativity in undergraduate education is important for the future development of society. To do this, an understanding of undergraduate characteristics is needed. A systematic literature review of the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and little-c creativity in undergraduates identified 19 studies. The creativity assessments within these investigations represented several conceptions of the construct with domain-general, self-reported measures of Person as most common. Results suggest that both Openness to Experience and Extraversion have strong, consistent, positive relationships with creativity. Few significant relations were found concerning Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Notable differences were found between NEO and IPIP inventories in regard to the strength of the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and creativity. Additional differences were also found concerning which students were assessed. Given these results along with previous research, six descriptive discriminant analyses (DDAs) were conducted to identify differences between honors and non-honors undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and those in non-STEM majors in relation to personality and creative self-beliefs. Surveys, which included a 120-item, 5-point scale measure of the Big Five and a 50-item, 5-point scale measure of creative self-beliefs, were completed by 573 undergraduates. No interaction effects were observed. However, each DDA had a statistically significant effect for having a STEM major and two had a statistically significant main effect for honors college enrollment. Most notable was the relationship between having a STEM major and Mechanical/Science creative self-belief. Limitations and implications are discussed.

Since their establishment in the 1960s, Universities of Technology in South Africa have been taking pride in providing career-focused qualifications that match the intermediate needs of the economy. In order to provide these career-focused qualifications, these institutions have been focusing on enacting a curriculum framework that emphasizes replication of industrial processes which tended to accentuate routinized, conventional problem-solving. The shift in economic paradigm in the 21st Century and the general dissatisfaction with graduate readiness in the workplace as evident in both local and international literature, framed as employability skills or generic skills, suggest a new impetus being placed on creativity, especially in engineering education. This study attempted to develop final-year undergraduates’ creativity through making visible the key features of a pedagogic practice, by analyzing the existing engineering undergraduate pedagogic practices, and reconceptualizing and testing a pedagogy that could potentially develop undergraduates’ creativity. The reconceptualized pedagogy, enacted as “learnshops”, accentuated teamwork, collaborative inquiry, guided creative problem-solving and the use of case studies to encourage students to seek the higher designs of water, paper and energy technologies within their institution. Design-Based Research (DBR) frames the methodology and methods of data collection and analysis. The research results show that existing engineering undergraduate pedagogic practices remain trapped in the skills training discourse that emphasizes conventional problemsolving in curriculum enactment. Students’ meanings of creativity remain generally eclectic prior and post involvement in the learnshops, although students’ creativity conceptions become more focused on imagination and resourcefulness postlearnshops. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) scores show that students’ creativity increased as a result of exposure to learnshops. Students working in teams of intermediate size to creatively solve given open-ended tasks related to sustainable development were able to achieve cooperation and generate useful ideas with the help of pedagogic interventions implemented during the learnshops. Itinerant membership as an aspect of team formation has little effect on teams’ generation of ideas.

Esta é uma investigação sobre a imaginação do artesão, captada na zona pré-reflexiva do ser, ou seja, num espaço psicológico anterior ao pensamento racional onde se enraíza um complexo individual do artesão, que caracteriza seu fazer. Através de entrevistas e observações de artesãos em seus trabalhos, buscou-se a imaginação criativa no campo da experiência do fazer manual, nascida da intimidade atenta entre o artesão e uma matéria que ele escolheu, por ter ressonância com sua individualidade. Conclui-se que o trabalho do artesão é fonte inesgotável de realização de sua individualidade, na medida em que o artesão consegue acolher, em seu íntimo, as limitações da matéria-prima onde imprime sua vontade / This is a study about the artisans imagination captivated in the pre reflexive zone of being, that is, in a psychological space before the rational mode of thinking where it roots the artisans individual complexity that characterize his work. Through interviews with and observations of the artisans in their working place, on search for the creative imagination, in the field of labor and doing experience, born from the attentive intimacy between the artisan and the raw material that he had chosen, because of its resonance with his individuality. One come to the conclusion that the artisans work is an inexhaustible wellspring of individual fulfillment as the artisan is able to shelter in his innermost the limits of the raw material where he prints his will

This thesis describes research carried to investigate the role of creative stimuli in the engineering design process. The research was cross-disciplinary bringing findings and perspectives from cognitive psychology to engineering design. The theoretical work undertaken has produced a model to represent how information can be made to work effectively as creative stimuli, inspiring creative ideas that in turn affect the design outputs produced through the creative design process. By combining participation action research with an observational audit, the information-use profiles were constructed for the innovation hub within the associated case company. These gave details of the types of projects and tasks undertaken by the case company; the designers working on them, and most importantly the information being used during design activities. It was shown that over 50% of the information uses recorded were working on diagrammatic representations, predominantly using CAD and imaging software. In this thesis it is shown that information captured, documented and stored by a company can be used as a useful source of creative stimuli. A tool was proposed to retrieve this information in a guided manner to support creative idea generation in industrial brainstorm sessions. The evidence suggested that introducing any of the tested formats of stimuli to a brainstorm group had positive affect on both the rate of idea production and the quality of the ideas being produced. Stimuli sourced internally to the case company in a guided manner were shown to perform as well as the most established creative stimuli tools available.

The aim of this study is to explore the emotion of disappointment in organisations and to develop a new line of theorising inspired by psychodynamic theory. The current literature casts disappointment as a negative emotion undermining morale, depressing expectations and justifying inaction and inertia. This only captures part of the complexity of disappointment and leaves unexplored both its impact on the organisation and its potential creativity. The study presents a theoretical framework derived from research that depicts disappointment as unfolding in three positions; I am disappointing, I am disappointed and I disappoint. It asserts the importance of disappointment as an integrative emotion. The study identifies a contradiction: that at the same time as being seen as ‘of little concern’ to individuals, there is fear within organisations that disappointment will undermine stability and destroy positive feelings. The study shows how disappointment is connected to, and may help to transform, the dynamics of blame in organisations. Such transformation can be based on an ability to integrate failure and on a development of the relationship between disappointment and learning. Disappointment represents the loss of the fantasy of stability. When reconceptualised in this way, disappointment results in a reimagining of possibility. Fantasy and reality are brought into conscious awareness and tolerated rather than extruded. The imaginary ideal organisation can be seen for what it is: a fantasy that can never be realised. The imaginary ideal is mourned and replaced by a more realistic entity. Organisation members’ previous efforts to organise disappointment through blame, shame and extrusion is now recognised as a disappointing strategy. Understood thus, disappointment is at the very heart of organising as it invites consideration of the relationship between fantasy and reality. This differentiates it from other types of social defences which, by their nature defend against thinking and learning.