The John Adair Handbook of Management and Leadership

Chapter 4: Creativity and innovation 63

4 customer focus; and

5 a conducive organisational climate.

Managers should be able to:

• manage for creativity


• provide an organisational environment in which innovation
  can thrive


• use a variety of techniques to stimulate ideas for products /
  services / systems and to generate ideas for bringing them to
  fruition.

To manage innovation (and draw ‘greatness’ out of people, it must

be seen as a process with three phases:

1 The generation of ideas (from individuals and teams)

2 The harvesting of ideas (people evaluating ideas)

3 The implementation of ideas (teams developing and

introducing ideas to the final, customer-satisfied stage).

In innovation it must be remembered that creative thinking makes

it possible and teamwork makes it happen. Successful innovation

requires an organisation and its key managers to be able to perform

five essential functions, these are as follows.

1 Recruit/select creative people

For the appropriate jobs, of course, you will need creative people

and their characteristics tend to be:

• high general intelligence


• strongly motivated


• stimulated by challenge


• vocational in attitude to work


• able to hold contradictory ideas together in creative tension