Creativity and innovation at greenpeace Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Creativity and innovation at greenpeace - Essay Example While implementing any sustainable strategy, an organization has to closely analyze its resources and capabilities such as culture, diversity, human capital, innovation and creativity, as if they are durable, transferable and replicable or not. Creativity and innovation among organizations usually occurs through development and implementation of new mechanisms in a non-traditional way. Any organizational environment constitutes a social and a cultural aspect called the field and the domain respectively. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1999), â€Å"creativity occurs when a person makes a change in a domain, a change that will be transmitted through time†. Creativity is essentially a two way process in which people must interact with the field and the domain to achieve certain level of novel variation. The person with specific set of talents and experiences transmits the body of knowledge in context of the cultural system (domain). The social system (field) then evaluates innovat ion and retains the selected creativeness in context of the domain. For instance, there are people in the field of modern art who decide whether the new paintings deserve to be purchased, collected and added to the domain or not. Amabile (1998) suggests that â€Å"within every individual, creativity is a function of three components: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation† illustrated in figure 01. In any organization, however, managers are fully capable of influencing these components via workplace practices and conditions. The intellectual, procedural and technical knowledge comprises the expertise. The novel and unique ways in which people approach certain issues come under the creative-thinking skills component, and the inner spirit and devotion required for tackling or solving a particular issue forms the motivation component. Factors such as challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support affect crea tivity and can be analyzed to enhance creativity in organizations. It is important to note here that some systemic practices are existent which may also kill creativity. Figure 01: The Three Components of Creativity. Source: (Amabile, 1998) According to West and Farr (1990), innovation is â€Å"the intentional introduction and application within a job, work team or organization of ideas, processes, products or procedures which are new to that job, work team or organization and which are designed to benefit the job, the work team or organization†. The process of innovation encompasses both the development of a concept and effective translation of that concept into practice. All organizations are capable of being innovative to certain extent depending on the sources of innovation and many of them consider creativity and innovation as part of their competitive strategies. If a change is beneficial, intentional and novel, it can be rightly regarded as innovation. Economic activit ies are mostly dependent on finite and limited set of natural resources present on earth. Overexploitation of these limited resources is continuously threatening the global economy, which at its core is embedded in the environment. Industries worldwide are depleting resources of the earth not taking into account the provision of relatively free ecosystem services. The changing patterns of resource scarcity have given rise to a new business model known as Natural Capitalism. According to Lovins et al. (1999), â€Å"