School Of Creative And Cultural Industries

by

School Of Creative And Cultural Industries

Introduction

The challenges that confront organizations entering the third millennium are complex, diverse and compelling. Businesses have been forced to make dynamic adjustments that have been transformative in impact and international in scope and the traditional methods of identifying, planning for and overcoming future obstacles have become more and more difficult. With these changes occurring, future prosperity of companies will depend increasingly upon their ability to innovate and their aptitude for creativity.

Since the 1990s, and into the 21st century, innovation and creativity have become recognized as primary means of achieving both social and economic goals. With today's businesses emerging into a rapidly evolving global environment, a company's capacity to innovate now plays an increasingly dominant, and perhaps decisive, role in achieving these goals. A report issued by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies described innovation as the engine for economic growth and an attraction for in-vestment from global partners. Creativity is also a rising topic and an important agenda item in the business world, indicated by the rise of creativity consulting firms, creativity departments in organizations, and "how-to" books dealing with creative stimulation (Amidon, 1998). Moreover, globalization and the competition that develops from interna-tionalization increasingly add to the need for creativity, and creativity is therefore becoming of high importance in knowledge management. Consistent with this world trend, over the last several years much attention has also been devoted to creativity from a more micro-perspective; such as understanding and harvesting the creative processes and potentials of the individual. Accordingly, the desirability of creativity and innovation in the workplace has drastically increased, and today's businesses are searching for ways to cultivate these two attributes amongst employees.

Organizational decision makers are now faced with the burden of motivating and promoting the creativity and innovation amongst employees that is demanded by today's competitive business world. However, by further understanding how to stimulate creativity, company managers can remedy this ailment by inducing innovation through the construction of a creative work environment. This paper explores a possible method of motivation that has been proven to improve creativity: intrinsic motivation. We hope to assemble an attainable solution to the problem of creativity development through the use and under-standing of intrinsic motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the specific relationships existing between innovation and creativity and one such possible tactic of cultivation: intrinsic motivation.

Our problem is how to create an intrinsically motivating environment and stimulate creativity and innovation within employees of technology sectors, and the usefulness of in-trinsic motivation on employees in organizations seeking to promote and stimulate creativity and innovation. The theoretical section of our paper will focus on previous findings of how intrinsic motivation can be used to stimulate creativity and innovation, and the latter two sections will focus on the analysis of empirical evidence coming from three of today's technology organizations that operate globally. Lastly we will conclude with some insights into designing intrinsically motivating environments for employees in to-day's ...