Making innovation happen in organizations: Individual creativity mechanisms, organizational creativity mechanisms or both?

Marketing managers increasingly face a product innovation dilemma. Managers will have to sell more with fewer new products in an environment where new products are providing lower revenue yields. Therefore, understanding what drives successful innovation is of paramount importance. This paper examin es the or,organizational innovation hypothesis that innovation is a functio n of individual efforts and organizational systems to facilitate creativity . Our model formulates creativity as a property of thought process that can be acquired and improved through instruction and practice. in this context , individual creativity mechanisms refer to activities undertaken by indivi dual employees within an organization to enhance their capability for devel oping something, which is meaningful and novel within their work environmen t. Organizational creativity mechanisms refer to the extent to which the or ganization has instituted formal approaches and tools, and provided resourc es to encourage meaningfully novel behaviors within the organization. Using data collected from 634 organizations, we find support for this hypothesis . The results suggest that the presence of both individual and organization al creativity mechanisms Zed to the highest level of innovation performance . The results also suggest that high levels of organizational creativity me chanisms (even in the presence of low levels of individual creativity) led to significantly superior innovation performance than low levels of organiz ational and individual creativity mechanisms. The paper also presents manag erial and academic implications. This study suggests that it is not enough for organizations to hire creative people and expect the innovation perform ance of the firm to be superior. Similarly: it is not enough for firms to e mphasize management practices to enhance creativity and ignore individual m echanisms. Although it is true that doing either will improve innovation pe rformance, doing both should lend to higher innovation levels. Our understa nding of what and how creativity influences innovation performance can be g reatly enhanced by additional research that integrates the intrinsic and ex trinsic drivers of creativity. Research that examines the role of team crea tivity efforts in enhancing innovation performance is also vital to an over all improved understanding of creativity, learning, and innovation within o rganizations. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.