Diagnosing Organizational Innovation: Measuring the Capacity for Innovation

Abstract

Organizational innovation involves reconciling many contradictions or paradoxes. Dividing the process of innovation into phases ranging from Activation to Validation and examining each phase in terms of the six Ps of creativity offers a framework for making sense of these contradictions. The Innovation Phase Assessment Instrument (IPAI) was designed to assess organizations according to such an approach. The scale was administered to 454 student volunteers and an analysis of their responses indicated that the IPAI is highly reliable and has substantial construct validity. At a practical level, it can be used for assessing the strengths/weaknesses of organizations in a differentiated way and for making recommendations for improving their capacity for innovation. It is also a source of research questions for examining creativity and innovation in an organizational context.

Notes

¹Bledow et al. (2009a, p. 305) stressed the importance in organizational innovation of not merely generating novelty (creativity), but of going further and implementing it in practice as well. The theoretical derivation of the seven phase/six dimension model was presented in detail in Cropley and Cropley (2012), and will not be repeated here.

Note. Node names (e.g., Cognition/Process) are shortened in this table, e.g., Generation/Process is abbreviated to Gen/Proc.