Development of a facilitation toolbox to foster creativity and innovation climate within teams

Abstract

Innovation is a necessity for every business and a key driver of competitiveness in today’s economic world. Researchers and practitioners are in search of ways to enhance creativity and innovation within organizations. IN.flow facilitation GmbH is a consultancy, facilitating organi-zational transformation towards innovation culture. One of IN.flow’s focuses is anchoring creativity and innovation within teams, because the complex problems organizations face today cannot be solved by an individual, but by teams. The basis for enhancing and providing constant team creativity and innovation flow is a team climate fostering creativity and innova-tion. The goal of this thesis is to elaborate the factors, fostering team climate that fosters creativity and innovation. According to these factors, a facilitation toolbox is developed con-taining tool cards, an IN.flow facilitator uses during customer workshops. In addition, an inter-vention concept is developed that helps the facilitator to plan his/her team intervention in order to grow and anchor a team climate fostering creativity and innovation. The methodology used for the development of this facilitation toolbox and intervention concept is the four-step innovation Design Thinking methodology called Double Diamond. The first two phases of the Double Diamond are called “discover” and “define” and contain in this the-sis a literature review and narrative interviews with innovation experts. The results of these phases are nine factors fostering team climate for creativity and innovation and good practice examples from the interviewees. The factors are clarifying and ensuring commitment to shared vision, task orientation, managing conflicts and minority dissent constructively, psychological safety, trust, cohesion, support for innovation, participation in decision-making and reflexivity. The third phase of the Double Diamond is called “development” and contains in this thesis two interactive workshops. The first workshop is a brainstorming workshop with facilitators from different fields like coaching, change facilitation and Design Thinking in order to summarize facilitation tools for the toolbox. The second workshop is a co-creative workshop during which customer journey mapping helps to develop the intervention concept for IN.flow facilitators. The developed toolbox contains 55 tool cards providing information to which factor(s), out of these nine, the tool contributes, how to apply it, how long it approximately takes, material and space needed, a recommendation when to apply it during the intervention and the source/theory the tool is based on. The developed intervention concept is called “3 month innovation journey” and is divided into three phases, which are initiation, innovation, and integration. In addition, a questionnaire is developed that helps the facilitator to recognize the current situation of the team regarding the nine factors fostering team climate for crea-tivity and innovation and plan his/her intervention accordingly. As innovation positively effects a firm’s market share, profitability, sales growth, revenues, patent citation rates, market leadership, firm renewal and efficiency, this thesis provides a modest contribution to these effects, because IN.flow facilitators and other Design Thinking facilitators can use this toolbox and intervention concept in order to enhance team climate fostering creativity and innovation. It is called a modest contribution, because many other fac-tors besides team climate, like leadership, organizational structures, salary, and many more need to be aligned in order to reach constant creativity and innovation flow within organizations.