The topic:
What is creativity? What drives creativity? How can we become more creative? How can we help others be more creative?
Those are the questions we will address in this MicroTalk.
Creativity is one of the most important skills associated with innovation. Yet, it is often considered an ill-defined concept that is hard, or even impossible, to manage.
In this talk, we will unpack the “creativity” phenomenon in order to deepen our understanding of it and learn how to manage it as an individual skill as well as an organizational capability.
More specifically, after agreeing on a definition of creativity, we will discuss the key drivers and blockers of creativity.
Then, we will outline some fundamental individual creative strategies to overcome our fundamental creativity blockers.
Finally, we will discuss some organisational levers that may be used to cultivate and elevate creativity in organizations.
The talk will be based on research findings from the vast literature on creativity management as well as best practices from the industrial design field.
This micro-talk will be held in English, on Zoom.
The expert:
Manuel Sosa is professor of technology and operations management (area chair) at INSEAD. He directs the Heinrich and Esther Baumann-Steiner Fund for Creativity and Business, the creativity-business learning platform, and the INSEAD-ArtCenter collaboration. He is also the founder and director of Innovation Palette, a consultancy firm that provides insights to unleash innovation (https://innovation-palette.com).
Professor Sosa’s research efforts are applied to improving the management of innovation. His recent research efforts focus on studying the role of design in transforming incumbent organizations into more innovative ones. He also investigates coordination and innovation networks in complex organizations. His research has been published in various top-rated academic journals in operations and organization management as well as in engineering design.
Professor Sosa’s teaching achievements include the development of a 20-year-long program with Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California) to integrate creative and business thinking for successful innovating. He also led the development of the Creative Garage space for teaching creative thinking at INSEAD’s Asia Campus. He has published over 20 teaching cases in topics related to innovation management. He has received the Dean’s commendation for excellence in MBA teaching multiple times and won the best teaching award for his MBA elective course on creative thinking in 2021.
Manuel E. Sosa received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, Venezuela) and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work experience includes systems engineering in the petrochemical industry, and development and deployment of computer-aided engineering software applications for the automobile and aerospace industries.