Creativity and knowledge management
Abstract
Purpose
Innovation within companies is becoming mandatory and vital. A policy of voluntarism aiming at supporting innovation can be based on an operational process managing the evolution of the firm's intellectual corpus, becoming a tool for innovation. This paper seeks to explain and demonstrate the link between knowledge management and innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
The fundamental assumption is to regard knowledge creation as an intellectual corpus evolution process, based on knowledge workers' creativity. Their creativity is stimulated by the critical analysis of the intellectual corpus, which leads to the creation of new technologic trajectories in continuity or divergence from existing trajectories. Based on a systemic model of intellectual capital, the analysis of the dynamic of knowledge has shown that the increase of value of intellectual capital may be described as an evolutionist process.
Findings
An experiment was conducted to validate the assumptions based on the analysis of the intellectual capital of a company, on the process of generating new items for the intellectual capital, on the regulation of this process by a community of knowledge workers and based on the integration of the results into the value chain of the organization.
Research limitations/implications
Based on interviews with experts about their inventive tracks during recent decades, the main limitations/difficulties come from making the inventory of the intellectual corpus of an organization.
Social implications
Social implications include an emphasis on the projection of experts' inventive tracks onto the knowledge map of the organization.
Originality/value
This paper links intellectual corpus and creativity: creation leads to intellectual property rights.
Keywords
Citation
Saulais, P. and Ermine, J. (2012), "Creativity and knowledge management", VINE, Vol. 42 No. 3/4, pp. 416-438. https://doi.org/10.1108/03055721211267521
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2012, Emerald Group Publishing Limited