The editors and fellow contributors of this work are well-known in the disciplines of innovation and strategy. Chris Bilton is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and Stephen Cummings is Professor of Management at Victoria Business School, New Zealand. Together, they have also written Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation (Wiley, New York, 2010).
Their fundamental argument in this Handbook is that management and creativity represent complementary functions and processes. The editors rightly acknowledge that each incorporates apparently contradictory elements but these “are not confined to two halves of a mental map or two separate floors in a building” (p. 10). The editors of the Handbook begin by distinguishing creativity from management and argue that they should not necessarily be antithetical.
The audience for this book is academics studying creativity and innovation, as well as senior professionals trying to bring creative ideas to the market in a more sophisticated and planned way.
The heart of this Handbook is a detailed explanation of the model of “bisociation”. This refers to the combination of apparently contradictory or paradoxical aspects Bilton and Cummings appropriated the term from Koestler's The Act of Creation (Arkana, London, 1989) where “biosociation” is the process of making connections between or across different frames or references, suggesting that assumptions can be questioned (p. 241).
This model describes four key aspects – innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organisation. Each of these four elements has two associated behaviours as follows:
Innovation – Discovery and creating
Entrepreneurship – Dilettantism and diligence
Leadership – Interacting and envisioning
Organisation – Controlling and unleashing
The integrating approach in this “bisociation” model echoes throughout the text. However, I would have liked this term better and earlier indexed, highlighted and explained. Its importance in the Handbook is often lost. The editors write an introduction to each part, showing where the chapters which follow fit in their model. This makes understanding much easier and the authors are to be commended for this. They did not just compile a collection of fragmented contributions: they actually edited!
The Handbook is the result of the contributions by 30 authors, mostly from the UK, but also from Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Canada. It presents 18 Chapters in five Parts:
Part I […] creative innovation
This first Part includes chapters on innovation in film-making, creativity outside the creative industries, innovation in services and beyond Western views of creativity.
Part II […] creative entrepreneurship
This second Part highlights that innovation is “not the only thing”, there are lessons from “happenstance”, the role of cultural entrepreneurship, and the creativity of entrepreneuring in the film, “The Full Monty”.
Part III […] creative leadership
This third Part explores leadership in turbulent times, a creativity-friendly leadership theory, creativity in leadership development, and creative leadership in practice at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Part IV […] creative organisation
This fourth Part examines “transoganisational” work, the paradox of planning pro-creative office design, stimulating creative thinking through “hybrid” thinking and shaping creative environments through the arts.
Part V […] around the creative cycle
This final Part concludes the Handbook by exploring creative management in practice in addressing their “biosociation” model with “timely balance”.
I especially liked the four chapters on creative leadership. Here, the various contributors show how even the much lauded visionary and transformative (VTL) and authentic leadership (AL) have still not contributed much to encouraging creative capacity among followers. The chapter on creative leadership development cleverly shows how “bisociation” is aided by convergent and divergent learning experiences, while the chapter on the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is a real gem.
The RSC is an iconic global brand whose product is intertwined with the very identity of a nation, confronted in recent years by increasing external competition and internal change. They rightly suggest “creative leadership in such a setting would be quite a challenge” (p. 249). The executive Director, Vikki Heywood and the editors pose a new model of leadership where creativity is fostered beyond a family and a team to an “ensemble”. Beginning with leading from the middle by “ensemble”, there were then four phases in creative renewal at the RSC – promote something distinctive from within; envision or “suss” by embodying a new way of proceeding; map the way toward the future and new relationships; link key nodes or stakeholders.
The various contributors in the Handbook rightly highlight that creativity is not the exclusive preserve of disorganised geniuses but that creativity exists in both large and small organisations and that creativity is not just about creative production in well-funded laboratories (iPads) or creative consumption (a la “Master Chef”). This is a wise refrain sounded 12 years earlier by Richard Florida in The Rise of the New Creative Class (Basic Books, New York, 2002) when he says that hairdressers can be creative too!
The book is generously indexed and each chapter provides substantial references. Most chapters have questions for discussion which are carefully linked with the arguments and the conclusions which precede them. It is a thoughtful piece of work.
The book would have been enriched if there was a little more consideration on the barriers to creativity, such as presented in Isaksen, Dorval and Treffinger's Creative Approaches to Problem-Solving (Sage, Los Angeles, 2011). At times, the Handbook seems to assume there is universal support for creative activity. Further, I would have liked even more advice and research evidence on how individuals and organisations could develop adaptive and creative capacity.
The book could have been further enhanced by the provision of even more summaries and integrating figures, and not just for visual appeal. There is a lot of (albeit worthwhile) text here, but each chapter could have been more accessible for the busy researcher and professional. There are further models in most chapters which could have been more attractively presented.
A real strength of this Handbook is that it provides serious, up-to-date research in creativity and how to successfully foster and manage it. I like how this Handbook dispels the viewpoints that management kills creativity or that creativity, at its best, is just about making new products or, at its worst, is just meaningless jargon.
This is a worthwhile book to access for a deeper understanding of creativity and how to bring enlightened management to creative entrepreneurship. In the Forward, Professor David Wilson from The Open University suggested that “creativity will have to be managed more creatively” (p. xviii). This Handbook contributes well to that endeavour. I recommend it highly.
