Introduction

In the last decade, business leaders have realized that creativity has become a major challenge in the organizations who seek to make profound changes within, in order to achieve their strategic goals (IBM CEO study 20101). Just as in the economic field, Nobel laureate in economics Edmund Strother Phelps argues that modern economic growth is a direct result of human initiative and creativity (Phelps 2013). Creativity has thus become an issue for the development of organizations and society in a globalized world, in which ideas and people circulate rapidly, technological change is extremely rapid, competition is increasingly exacerbated, and environmental issues are becoming increasingly prevalent (Parmentier et al. 2017). Thus, organizations must find and implement creative ideas to survive this era; they must constantly reinvent themselves.

After a long history of being confined to the fields of art or great inventions and being the prerogative of exceptional individuals (Kris 1952), creativity is now perceived as a fundamental human capacity (Lubart 2003). Progressively, during the 20th century, work on the processes, methods and cognitive foundations of creativity made it possible to understand how this capacity is activated and developed in the individual. The term creativity itself is a recent one, appearing in the latter part of the 20th century in the work of Baron, "in the narrow sense, creativity refers to the abilities that are most characteristic of creative people" (Baron 1951, p. 444), and Stein, "creative work is a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group in some point in time" (Stein 1953). Previously, authors used the terms "invention" (Poincaré 1908) or "creative thinking" (Wallas 1926; Hutchinson 1931). More recently, Amabile's much-quoted definition, "creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas by an individual or small group of individuals working together" (Amabile 1988a, p. 126), has illustrated this dual dimension of novelty and usefulness, in which "to be creative, an idea must also be appropriate, useful and actionable" (Amabile 1998b, p. 78). This can be summarized as follows: creativity is the activity of producing new, appropriate and actionable ideas, conceived by an individual or a small group of individuals working together.

At the collective and organizational level, research on creativity dates back to the 1990s. The research aimed to describe the individual factors (character traits, emotions, qualities of the person) and contextual factors that are favorable or unfavorable to the expression of creativity (Sarooghi et al. 2015). Thus, since the work of Amabile (1988a, 1988b), who was the first to address the individual and collective levels of creativity in organizations, many works have been developed on the topic of organizational creativity. Amabile has developed a componential approach that identifies three essential composites for creativity: motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic), skills specific to the individual's domain (expertise and knowledge) and skills specific to creativity. She translates this model to the organizational level to qualify innovation. Other works, such as the interactionist approach of Woodman et al. (1993), have emphasized that the performance of an organization in terms of organizational creativity depends on the interactions between individual factors, creative behaviors and creative outcomes (Woodman et al. 1993). Ford's evolutionary approach more specifically identifies the factors that intentionally lead the individual to undertake creative action, i.e. what constrains and facilitates creative action at both the individual and collective levels (Ford 1996). At a more empirical level, the creative environment approach, based on extensive field research, has attempted to identify the organizational factors that create a favorable environment for creative action (Amabile et al. 1996; Ekvall 1996).

Progressively, it is therefore a multilevel approach that has been developed to explain the phenomena of organizational creativity and take into account the intertwining of the individual, group and organizational components. However, organizational approaches to creativity are limited in explaining creativity in organizations. Amabile's componential model establishes a process of group creativity, individual and organizational components of creativity, but it focuses, at the organizational level, more on innovation than on creativity. The interactionist model of Woodman and his team tries to link organizational creativity to individual, group and organizational characteristics, but creative processes and the creative act are absent from their model. Ford's evolutionary model proposes a social process of selecting the creative act at the individual level, which, however, is not linked to the process of individual and organizational creativity. The organizational climate approach shows that managers can have a strong influence on organizational creativity with management styles that integrate the KEYS and SOQ2 (Amabile et al. 1996; Ekvall 1996).

Previous research on organizational creativity has therefore mainly focused on creativity in organizations or with the organization. It has been hampered by the complexity of the "organization" object, with a lack of links with strategic management and business models. At the same time as this literature was being developed, a new understanding of the strategic capabilities of an organization was being constructed through the notion of organizational capabilities, in particular to better explain the performance of an organization. The concept of organizational capabilities was developed to better explain the performance of an organization and its ability to innovate and adapt to rapidly changing environments. The organizational capabilities approach thus enriches research on organizational creativity, because it adopts the organizational and strategic level as the starting point of analysis, examining in particular the processes and routines that constitute the foundations of the organization.

The purpose of this book is to develop the concept of organizational creative capabilities and to anchor it both theoretically and empirically so that researchers can more easily apply it to their research and practitioners can integrate it into their management practices. This book is the result of the research project CCO (Capacités créatives des organisations, literally meaning the organizational creative capabilities) supported by the ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche, French Research Agency). The project regularly brought together a dozen researchers, who debated with passion and method the interest, the foundation and the constituents of the concept of organizational creative capability. They went into the field to identify the existence of these capabilities and deployed large-scale surveys among managers of small and large companies around the world to build tools for measuring creative capabilities.

The book consists of eight chapters.

The first chapter establishes the value of a capabilities approach to organizational creativity and explores the concept of organizational capabilities. In this chapter, Guy Parmentier identifies the routines that make up these capabilities and the factors that promote their proper functioning. He proposes a model whose components will be developed in part in the following chapters.

The second chapter develops the link between openness and organizational creative capability. Émilie Ruiz and Guy Parmentier present the origin of the concept of open innovation, the different modalities of openness that support the organizational and key role of absorptive capacities for this openness to be transformed into creative capabilities.

The third chapter explores the critical role of equipment in developing the creativity of individuals and teams. Romain Rampa and Guy Parmentier identify the effects and limitations of equipment on creative abilities. They document methods and present concrete examples of innovative spaces and tools that have been implemented by various companies.

The fourth chapter clarifies the different conceptions of slack and its role in organizational creative capability. Romain Rampa and Guy Parmentier point out that the pool of creative resources and ideas is one of the main levers on which organizations can rely to introduce novelty and support creative capabilities. They give concrete examples of organizational arrangements that enable the deployment of a slack that is favorable to organizational creativity.

The fifth chapter analyzes the effect of agile methods on organizational creativity in video games. Florence Jeannot, Maxime Mellard and Guy Parmentier build and test a model where the agile method has a direct effect on the perceived originality of a video game and an indirect effect via organizational creative capability. The study validates the direct effect of the use of agile methods on the creativity of video games, as well as the mediating effect of creative capabilities between agile methods and the creativity of these video games.

The sixth chapter details the journey of an idea and the formal and informal approaches to managing this journey in an organization. Guy Parmentier, Séverine Le Loarne-Lemaire and Romain Rampa discuss the different challenges of...