Lost in Translation? A Review of Popular-press Claims about Organizational Creativity and Innovation

ABSTRACT

The disconnect between research and practice in applied psychology, or the research–practice gap, has been discussed as an important issue for decades, but the discussion of this divide has yet to be extended to the topic of creativity and innovation in organizations. In an initial attempt to understand the research–practice gap on this topic, we conducted a systematic investigation regarding popular-press claims about creativity and innovation. The present study identified 17 claims made about organizational creativity and innovation using thematic analysis and quantitatively coded a sample of popular-press articles to investigate the prevalence and nature of these claims as well as author characteristics. Results provided initial evidence of a research–practice gap for some claims, but not for others. The professional backgrounds of authors were not associated with the nature of the claims presented, although it should be noted that few authors had a background in research. Study findings may be leveraged to inform future work on the disconnect between research and practice regarding creativity and innovation in organizations, as well as initiatives to narrow the research–practice gap on this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. One person starts the game by whispering a short message to another, that is then whispered to another, and so on down a line. Then the final person in the line proclaims aloud the message they heard – which is rarely the same as the message that started the game.

2. Although Damanpour’s (1992) article is a “hit” by scholarly standards (presently cited over 1,200 times according to Google Scholar), Inc. has an estimated audience of 13 million unique readers per month (Roush, 2016).

3. We also examined author information in the remaining 101 articles in the full sample. Since the results for these two samples were similar, we present only the results for the sample of the 100 articles coded for claims.

4. Some authors were coded as having more than one profession – therefore, these percentages do not total to 100%.