Edinburgh Napier University

  Abstract
Creativity and innovation are very important capabilities within an organisation for sustainability, profitable growth and business success. Creativity and innovation in organisations are complex capacities containing many interrelating determinant factors. This complexity involves the influence of managerial and organisational factors such as individual and collective knowledge creation, shared behaviour, leadership style, routines, resources available, structures and infrastructures. These complex interrelating factors build patterns that explain how the system within the case organisation facilitates creativity and produces improvement and innovation.

This doctoral thesis investigation examines the organisation and, designs the system models on a macro level (organisational perspective) and micro level (individual and collective perspective). This system investigation comprises the identification of patterns through quantitative pattern analysis (macro level) and a qualitative pattern analysis (micro level). The identified interrelating patterns can be seen as the ‘blue print’ of the system of the organisational creativity and innovation capacity.

The analysis identified sixteen interrelating factors on the macro level and nine interrelating patterns on the micro level. As expected the macro level revealed that leadership, organisational behaviour and interdisciplinary creative working are the main determinants of the organisational innovation performance and improvement performance. The analysis of the micro level allowed theory elaboration, which resulted in a model of ‘being in the thick of the action’ and ‘Freiraum’ (German word for ‘free space’, ‘free time frame’ or ‘free environment’). This system model of the ‘Freiraum-theory’ is a ‘human-centric’ model that explains how to facilitate creativity and innovation in organisations.