Paper session 1
Scheduled: Monday 8th, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: 1S3
Chair: Joel Schmidt
Papers
Business Modelling Toolbox – The aBC Tool for Creative Entrepreneurs. A Business of Creativity
Armina Popeanu, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning Bucharest
The significance of business modeling in the context of creative entrepreneurship cannot be overstated, as it assumes a central role in furnishing a systematic framework for entrepreneurs to conceptualize, plan, and execute innovative ventures. In the landscape of creative enterprise, characterized by the primacy of originality and uniqueness, a meticulously defined business model functions as a guiding roadmap, steering entrepreneurs through the complexities of translating creative concepts into viable and profitable enterprises. This structured approach facilitates strategic decision-making by delineating crucial elements encompassing the value proposition, customers, activities, target market, revenue streams, and cost structures.
Concurrently, the aBC toolbox tailored for Creative Entrepreneurs emerges as a valuable instrument, providing founders with a distinctive means to anticipate challenges through the interactive application of the accompanying game. Consequently, the aBC toolbox stands as an indispensable asset for creative entrepreneurs, endowing them with the capacity to adeptly navigate the confluence of artistic innovation and business practicality, thereby elevating their overall business acumen.
Oana Velcu-Laitinen, Aalto University, Department of Design
In a 2010 IBM study, CEOs around the globe recognised creative leadership to be a valuable competence in complex environments. In the same year, IBM interviewed 700 Global Chief Human Resource Offices, out of which 69% thought they failed in effectively developing the creative capability of their leaders. We believe the investigations into the perceived nature of one’s creative identity as a leader can bring clarity into how creativity can become a personal resource for managing uncertainty and solving the unexpected problems in the workplace.
Digital transformations are a reality that companies need to navigate (Scuotto et al., 2022). This study examines digital leaders’ creative self-concepts as a potential source for leading digital transformations. More specifically, this research aims to understand the nature of digital leaders’ creative self-concept and the contexts when they see it as an opportunity and when they see it as a threat to leading digital transformations (DT).
The creative self-concepts and creative self-beliefs have been explored in eminent creators (Lebuda & Csikszentmihalyi, 2017). However, an extended analysis of these topics in the leadership contexts might enable a better understanding of human development and performance in work-life.
Also, previous research explored the link between transformational leadership and organizational creativity, based on the assumption that employees need to be creative and that specific leadership styles empower employees to think and act creatively (Herman et al., 2023). In this paper, we focus on the leaders’ need to use their creativity and lead through organizational change. We thus explore how the creative self-concept influences the choice of leadership styles and the perceived challenges that trigger leaders’ willingness to lead with creativity.
Career Success and Future Skills: The Hidden Potential of Motivation, Creativity and Innovation
Joel T. Schmidt & Min Tang, Institute for Creativity and Innovation, University of Applied Management | Hochschule Schaffhausen
Considering the context of a rapidly changing work world together with the fragile post-pandemic economy, tensions of regional conflicts, nonlinear progression of climate change, and the unforeseeable development of new technologies, the "now" in which we live is becoming increasingly chaotic and unpredictable. The future is also impacted and remains dynamic in a constant state of change, where possibilities are elusive and strategic decision-making is fraught with uncertainty. Attempting to articulate this, the factors of brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible (BANI) is becoming widely accepted as an expression that effectively describes and characterizes this state of change. In the context of work and HR development BANI expresses the impacts on people management in organizations for the identification and development of necessary skills and competencies for employees in the future. These challenges face both employers and employees in efforts to plan for the future, selecting the best possible areas of development. This presentation explores the integral role of motivation, creativity and innovation as core constructs for unlocking possibilities in achieving career success in this challenging BANI environment. From a psychological perspective, each of these competencies has the potential to contribute to employee well-being, success and performance in dynamic career contexts. With an integrated approach focusing on the synergies between these competencies, possibilities increase. By emphasizing the combined benefits of motivation, creativity and innovation in personal well-being, problem-solving, sustained excellence, and organizational growth, the presentation provides valuable insights for possible futures that can be shaped by motivation, creativity and innovation.
Tatjana Dragovic, University of Cambridge
‘What else is possible?’ was a question asked by one of the delegates attending a three-year long leadership development programme based on transdisciplinary possibilities for translation of academic research on creativity and dialogue into international/multicultural corporation contexts. The paper reports on how the leadership programme with a post-humanist lens on human-non-human interactions, embodiment and arts-based explorations combined academic research on possibility thinking (Craft et al., 2012), communal and collaborative creativity (Burnard and Dragovic, 2014), dialogic interactions (Hennessy et al., 2018) and coaching (Dragovic Andersen and Stewart, 2023) to open possibilities for leaders to un-create, re-create and co-create business processes, decision-making strategies, change management and conflict transformation approaches. As they engaged with music, words and material, boundaries, silo-ing and separations disappear, and shared possibilities and more-than-human relations emerged leading to, in their own words, transformative experiences of the leaders. The academic research translated into the leadership development practice encompassed transdisciplinary research assemblage from the fields of education, music performance, rule of law and governance. The programmes’ arts-based possibilities for fostering leadership development do not only provide a twist, i.e. an ‘out of the box’ post-humanist framework but they also feed-back to academic research as the leaders’ unlocked creativity inspire methodological innovations through synaesthesia-based data collection methods e.g., overlapping visual and auditory, material and non-material, kinaesthetic and olfactory data. Thus, transdisciplinary possibilities for translating academic research into professional practices led back to possibility thinking regarding further development of academic research practice. Academic researchers are hence challenged to think ‘What else is possible?’ just as the leaders in international/multicultural corporation contexts started asking themselves.
