Stimulating creativity in organizational teams.

Stimulating creativity and innovation are essential for tackling the current societal and economic challenges, and for fostering competitive positions, growth and job creation (CIS & EC-CEI, 2012; NBB, 2010). Creativity differs from innovation, since the ideas developed during the creative process need to be implemented successfully in the organization in order to be considered as innovation (Amabile, 1996). Despite its key role in today's economy, enterprises seem to have difficulties to properly stimulate creativity (Chang & Birkett 2004; Kachelmeier et al., 2008). This doctoral research project makes an important contribution to practice by experimentally examining how creative output in organizations can be stimulated through the design of better incentive systems. By focusing on the creative output of groups, this project explicitly acknowledges that team-based structures are increasingly used in organizations since groups bring along benefits due to improved coordination of information, skills and effort (Sprinkle, 2003).

Keywords:incentive systems, groups, creativity

Disciplines:Applied economics, Economic history, Macroeconomics and monetary economics, Microeconomics, Tourism