Ensuring a Creative and Innovative Workforce Essay

Ensuring a Creative and Innovative Workforce - Essay Example The recent shift from industrial to knowledge economies has been rapid and abrupt, leading to a series of novel discoveries and innovation in various fields across all sectors of the economy, thereby drastically increasing the significance of creating and developing a highly creative workforce. The fact that innovation is the key to human survival, has been reasserted over the years, with a wide range of creative and innovative ideas being generated and applied for human consumption. Companies today rate creativity and innovation as highly essential pre-requisite of strategies, designed to achieve their organizational goals. Various challenges can be overcome and addressed through sheer creativity, which are faced by the 21st century, such as global warming and sustainable economic development to name a few. Organizational creativity is one of the most promising issues, which is now being probed by managers and leaders, and its relevance and significance is acknowledged by the emerge nce in the recent decades. Definitions: Creativity is defined as the development of novel and useful ideas (Hemlin et al., in Mumford, 2011). According to Plucker et al., (2004) the term creativity is defined as "...the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context". According to Ford (1995) "Creativity is a context specific, subjective judgment of the novelty and value of an outcome of an individual's or a collective's behavior (West, 1997, Pp. 2). Innovation in generic terms refers to the development and application of novel ideas, products or services, or technologies in an organization. According to Van de Ven (1986) the process of innovation is defined as "the development and implementation of new ideas by people who over time engage in transactions with others within an institutional context. This definition is sufficiently general to apply to a wide variety of technical, product, process, and administrative kinds of innovations. From a managerial viewpoint, to understand the process of innovation is to understand the factors that facilitate and inhibit the development of innovations" (Sisaye, 2001, Pp. 105). In a nutshell, the concept of creativity entails the application of a mental as well as a social process which is fuelled by an insight regarding the future demands and requirements of consumers, and generating ideas and concepts in response to the meet the requirements of the same. Innovation on the other hand, refers to the successful application of the said ideas and concepts with a view to generate profitable outcomes. In order to successfully create and develop innovative products and ideas, it is essential for the management to hire and recruit a highly creative workforce and develop a highly productive workforce by encouraging creativity and innovation within organizations. Significance and relevance of the co ncepts as applied to organizations: Creativity is the first step or foundation of innovation, which can be achieved through the successful implementation of the creative ideas generated by the talented workforce. Innovation is one of the crucial and inevitable elements of organizational success, more so in the highly advanced society, which is practically driven