R&D Managers who want to sustain the creativity of the inventors in their departments must cope with an unexpected problem — success — according to the January issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS?).
Management Insights, a regular feature of the journal, is a digest of important research in business, management, operations research, and management science. It appears in every issue of the monthly journal.
“Past Success and Creativity over Times: A Study of Inventors in the Hard Disk Drive Industry” is by Pino G. Audia of the University of California, Berkeley and Jack A. Goncalo of Cornell University.
R&D managers interested in increasing the creative output of their departments should be aware that successful inventors could become less creative over time, warn the authors.
In their study, they find that inventors who have experienced success in their efforts to patent their inventions continue to generate new patents but, over time these patents tend to be less divergent from their previous work. This finding implies that allocating more resources to the most prolific inventors may increase the productivity of their department, but it may diminish the extent to which their creative output reflects the exploration of new areas of research.
The negative effects of success on creativity can be managed, say Professors Audia and Goncalo, by encouraging inventors to collaborate with one another and by making “exploration” an explicit and desirable organizational goal.