How Building a Climate for Creativity can Promote Innovative Activities

Abstract: Innovation is most commonly associated with the process of implementing useful ideas to create value-adding products, services and processes in an organization. However, what most organizations fail to recognize is the importance of idea generation, and thus creativity, as a fundamental part of the innovation process and essentially a precondition for innovation. Companies and organization in general put great focus on innovation, but are perhaps less equipped to work with creativity. However, seeing that creativity is such an important part of working with innovation in the long run, companies should pay more attention to creativity as a first step of generating new ideas. The purpose of this thesis is to observe the organizational climate of a business unit at a multinational vehicle safety company that recently began developing a new innovation department. The aim of the new department is to build a climate that foster creativity and innovation in the long run. Therefor, the research aim to identifying activities and success factors crucial for building a creative climate and promoting creativity as a key factor for innovation. The findings show how the organization works with several different activities and it provides a foundation for how to continue the work with creativity, and successfully build a creative climate.