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Author:

Sosa, Manuel; Danilovic, Mike

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One of the most difficult challenges when managing innovation is to identify the individuals within the organization that need to work closely with each other to maximize the generation of creative ideas. Formal organizational structures not only shape the communication patterns among development actors but also impact their interaction outcomes. This paper introduces a structured approach to guide managers to form a temporary team (or task force) from which creative solutions would be demanded. Our approach exploits the notion of creative interactions, which recognizes that people trigger the generation of creative ideas when interacting with each other for task-related matters. The goal of our approach is to identify groups of individuals within the organization that have a history of triggering the generation of creative ideas when interacting with each other. Our approach is structured in three steps: 1) Capturing the current organizational structure; 2) Measuring creative dyadic interactions; and 3) Forming clusters of creatives. We illustrate our approach by implementing it in the development department of a European software firm.

Keywords:

organization design, creativity, clustering analysis, software development