Adopting a Creative Device : Between Organizational Creativity and Organizational Innovation

Creativity is one of firms' major preoccupations, as evidenced by the diversity of creative devices designed to foster it. While the literature explains these empirical findings by highlighting their benefits or the antecedents that promote it, it pays little attention to the tensions associated with its adoption. In line with recent work, it appears that the creative device articulates both organizational creativity and organizational innovation. The organizational changes implied by the creative device lead firms to face many tensions related to the antecedents of organizational creativity and organizational innovation. This work therefore aims to identify and study the tensions resulting from the articulation between both organizational creativity and organizational innovation. We study the Créativ'Café, Schmidt Groupe's internal creative device. Through an exploratory case study, our results show that the adoption of the creative device is influenced by three main tensions: a "motivation versus commitment" tension of the participants when Créativ'Café was launched, a "creativity versus control" tension, which influenced its use, and an "integration versus autonomy", which slowed down its sustainability.