Creativity has long been accepted as a core competence that can help a company create products, services, processes, or ideas that are better or new. Unfortunately, many companies and managers try to adopt a one-size-fits-all “best practice” for creativity, often leading to disappointing results—because each new creative endeavor needs a different approach. Creativity at Work provides a comprehensive guide that will help managers recognize their creative situation and then assess what practices and tools will work best for their circumstances.

Another stellar book in the University of Michigan Business School series, Creativity at Work offers a concise summary of practices that stimulate innovation in the organization, providing multiple creativity tools that have been field-tested in companies all over the world. Rather than simply targeting an organization’s “creative types,” the book integrates the perspectives of investors, strategists, organizational developers, and individual managers to provide a multilevel framework that reaches all parts of the organization.

The authors show how the creation of new ideas is just one of the valuable outcomes of creativity, and they reveal how creativity can occur at many stages in the process of generating, developing, making, and selling new products, services, and processes. The book demonstrates how creativity is most successful when organizational practices are tailored to the specific situation, and it offers a systematic approach to developing creativity competencies throughout the enterprise.

Whatever your level of responsibility, the framework detailed in this book can identify innovation and value creation opportunities while helping you guide, manage, and integrate creativity practices within your organization, division, department, or team.