Why treating innovation as a strategic end-product misses the deeper dynamics of how new value is created — and how creativity, as its prerequisite, emerges through improvisational dialogue.
Innovation has become one of the most ubiquitous concepts in contemporary organizational discourse. Scholars and practitioners cite it as a silver lining for organizations facing fierce competition and disruption. Yet this very ubiquity has diluted its meaning. Many organizations define innovation as an end product of a deliberate strategy — something to be managed, measured, and delivered on schedule.
My research challenges this instrumental view. When organizations treat innovation as output rather than emergent process, they often undermine the very conditions that make genuine innovation possible. The question shifts from "How do we produce innovation?" to "How do we become an organization where innovation naturally emerges?"
Creativity is a prerequisite for realising innovative ways forward on a sustainable basis. Without creativity, innovation becomes mere optimization — the refinement of existing patterns rather than the emergence of genuinely new possibilities.
A central argument in my work is that creativity and innovation exist in a 'hand-in-hand' relationship. Creativity is not simply one input among many in the innovation process — it is the fundamental prerequisite without which true innovation cannot occur. The aim is to establish ways of bringing creativity alive as a taken-for-granted custom and practice within organizations.
This perspective draws on the distinction between Kronos-governed innovation — linear, planned, measurable — and Kairos-responsive creativity — emergent, situational, attuned to the moment. Organizations need both, but the creative dimension is systematically undervalued in management practice because it resists the quantification and control that Kronos-time demands.
My research design uses jazz performance not as a distant metaphor for innovation but as a lived experiential catalyst. Rather than telling leaders to "be like Miles Davis," I create conditions where organizational members actually experience improvisation.
This addresses a persistent critique of the jazz metaphor in innovation literature: that abstract musical analogies offer limited guidance to non-musicians. By shifting from metaphor to experience, the embodied principles of creative emergence become accessible — opening new conversations about what innovation actually requires at the level of daily organizational interaction.