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Creative and habitual actions represent competing behavioral options that may be simultaneously influenced by multiple domains of social action. This article integrates psychological and sociological descriptions of creativity and conformity to present a theory of individual creative action within organizational settings composed of intertwined group, organizational, institutional. and market domains. This theory contributes to the innovation literature by illustrating how intentional action and evolutionary processes that legitimize action interact to facilitate creativity and innovation.
It is hard to imagine a journey leading to the development of an innovation that did not incorporate several creative leaps along the way. Certainly, popular conceptions suggest that creative acts are the primary events that distinguish innovations from more pedestrian pursuits. Creativity and innovation are so closely linked in people's minds that some use the terms interchangeably, and others view them as symbiotically related phenomena necessary for the development of new systems, products, and technologies. Even the Academy of Management Review's subject index entry for "Creativity" reads "See innovation."
Given this closeness, one would expect innovation researchers and creativity researchers to be working hand in hand to solve the mysteries surrounding these complex events. However, these intimately related concepts have been studied primarily by inhabitants of divergent disciplinary worlds. Innovation has been the purview of disciplines such as sociology, economics, engineering, and organizational theory. In contrast, creativity has been examined almost exclusively within psychology. For the most part, researchers studying the one topic have been only peripherally aware of the work done by those studying the other topic. As a result, creativity researchers and innovation researchers have failed to capitalize on potential synergies.
If researchers' intuitive notions are correct that creativity and innovation are intimately related areas of inquiry, then how should they conceive of the relationship between the two? One argument holds that creativity and innovation are basically the same phenomenon, but they occur at different levels of analysis. According to another argument, creativity is mainly important as a key input into the alternative generation phase of the innovation process. However, both of these concepts unnecessarily limit the role creativity plays in innovation research. Innovation researchers at the organizational and industrial levels of analyses have generally ignored creativity research on individuals and groups. Empirical studies of innovation that...