The Role of Organizational Creativity towards Innovations: A Conceptual Review on Services Sector Research Directions

Abstract

Previous researches and recently found empirical studies have equally treated creativity and implementation as highlights of competitive edge for an organization. This study has followed a deductive approach to review different thoughts and key components of early studies to present how creativity and innovation have been examined. Accordingly, contribution to knowledge has been proposed via a critical review of literature. Creativity is something done by creative people, and researchers found in aged-decades seemed their works in par with this notion focusing predominantly on individual differences. Most of the studies have aligned to the postulations of “creative” by extending its connection addressing how they are different from individual subjectivities, how it has centered to gain y competitiveness, connections of creativity towards environment, role of personality traits, and works styles of creative people. In brief, traditional approaches emphasized the importance of helping people to become more creative in their work environment and it ignored the role of the social environment in creativity and innovation which is intensively examined in the contemporary researches. Alongside, contemporary approach assumes all humans with general abilities are able to present at least creative work in some domain provided that social environment and related factors are laid as complementary integration to the system or procedures that push individual dynamics on creative behavior. This paper reviews those concepts and provides a guide to services sector organizations referring the practice –related directions to initiative service innovations. Further, this paper highlights and concludes avenues to extend future studies towards service innovations by highlighting Sri Lanka as a specific context for services.