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Seet, Pi-Shen --- "Creativity paradox" [2008] MonashBusRw 6; (2008) 4(1) Monash Business Review 25

Creativity paradox

Pi-Shen Seet

Effective entrepreneurship creates predictability out of ambiguity, chaos and uncertainty – a confounding paradox, writes Pi-Shen Seet.

Paradox comes from the Greek words ‘para’ meaning ‘beyond’ and ‘doxa’ meaning ‘opinion’. The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it as “a situation or statement which seems impossible or is difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics”.

Paradox is increasingly being used in management research. This intensification of paradoxes and dilemmas has been attributed to a trend of increasing technological change, global competition and workforce diversity. Managers are asked to increase efficiency and foster creativity, build individualistic teams and think globally while acting locally. The intensification has led to some claiming that the expression ‘It’s a paradox’, is rapidly becoming the management cliché of our time – overused and underspecified.

In terms of entrepreneurship, paradox is useful in explaining the combination of ideas which were initially remote from each other and which the entrepreneur (the ‘between-taker’) combines to create value. In the entrepreneurial process, this can take the form of synthesising seemingly opposing ideas from different ‘matrices of thought’ , different factors of production, different parties with different interests and concepts from different scientific and academic disciplines. These processes may be complex and diverse and even chaotic, but using the concepts embedded in paradox, it is possible to bring innovators into the entrepreneurial process and therefore address one of the most ‘confounding aspects’ of understanding the entrepreneurial process.

To understand entrepreneurship, any research methodology must be able to handle the nonlinear, unstable discontinuities of the paradox. Creativity is commonly seen as a thinking process that leads to the development of novel and valuable ideas and its ‘Janusian’ structure enables it to deal with conflicting thoughts and paradoxes.

There are two approaches to harnessing creativity. First, creative solutions tend to come to us when our attention is wandering casually and subconsciously among alternative frames, rather than being consciously focused on one.

Second, creativity is based on the idea that creative action results when an individual combines two or more previously unrelated matrices of information. Koestler called this process “bisociation”, which he defined as “the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of thought”. Consider Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press that combined the techniques of the wine press and the seal.

Koestler’s concept of “bisociative thinking” can be illustrated thus: Two planes of thought intersect; instead of continuing on the same logical plane (dotted line), they collide, with a bisecting plane and bisociate, and shoot off at a tangent. The circular patterns on the first plane show that the thinker was stuck, circling around the problem, until the new thought strikes (Figure 1).


Figure 1 Koestler’s concept of ‘biosociative thinking’

Matrices may be combined in a flash of insight which interrupts a period of mental incubation; bisociation may also occur following a conscious and sequential process of logical reasoning and experimentation. In either case, the bisociative thought process that leads to entrepreneurial action is dependent on the existence of an appropriate stimulus, domain knowledge, and creativity.

Innovation takes creativity a step further as ‘creativity implemented.’ It is taking creative ideas and bringing them to life so that they can make an impact on people’s lives, a further bisociation, and also change organisations. While entrepreneurs are by nature creative, successful entrepreneurs need to go the next step and be innovative to develop, market and ultimately commercialise the product or service they have created. Translated into innovation, bisociation sees the need to combine matrices of theoretical thought and practical information that allows the entrepreneur to identify an opportunity and seize it through action.

Much of the attraction of entrepreneurship and innovation in the New Economy is that economic growth is advanced via new technology through a process of ‘creative destruction.’ However, instead of ‘destruction’, the bulk of modern post-World War II technological innovations (more than 90 per cent) have occurred with novel combinations of existing ideas, technologies or disciplines. This follows Kodoma (1991) who attributes Japanese success at achieving high-technology catch-up through a process ‘fusion’: for example ‘mechatronics’, the combination of mechanical engineering and electronic engineering and ‘opto-electronics’, the combination of optics with electronics.

The most predominant view of this form of innovation in entrepreneurship is that developed by Schumpeter, who defined the entrepreneur as someone who implements “new combinations of means of production”. This may be done through introducing new economic goods or products, introducing a new method of production or production processes, opening a new market, gaining a new source of raw materials or inputs (including finance); or changing the structure of an individual organisation or an industry. Schumpeter argues that innovation cannot stop at just generating a new idea as an inventor might do but must include implementation of the new idea or activity.

Schumpeter’s view of entrepreneurship is paradoxical. He spoke of a “gale of creative destruction”. So is this ‘creative’ or ‘destructive’? In reality, it is ‘both’. Schumpeter’s entrepreneur creates new activities and markets and so also ‘destroys’ or supersedes the old markets, hence their role in the economy is both creative and destructive. While Schumpeter focused on the entrepreneur doing things differently, his concepts can be used to understand entrepreneurship at the cognitive level. Innovation occurs between contrasting values and innovation is a way of reconciling remoteness with new associations and being diverse by supplying something useful and so unifying that diversity.

The understanding of the paradoxical nature of entrepreneurship gives a new dynamic and integrative perspective of the entrepreneurial process. This article argues that a conceptualisation of the entrepreneurship based on paradox facilitates the understanding of non-linear, dynamic processes. In particular, the concept of paradox or dilemma reconciliation is able to capture the creativity and innovation process.

Conceptualisation is but an initial step in theory building. What needs to follow will be the development of more sophisticated constructs and models so that the concept can further be refined and built in an iterative process of theory building and theory testing. For example, a relatively under-researched area that paradox could throw more light on is that of the dynamics of failure and success or trial and error within the entrepreneurial process, effectively building paradox: in order to succeed, one has often first to fail.

MBR subscribers: to view full academic paper email mbr@buseco.monash.edu.au

Public access: www.mbr.monash.edu/full-papers.html (six month embargo applies)

Cite this article as

Seet, Pi-Shen. 'Creativity paradox'. Monash Business Review. 2008.; Monash University ePress: Victoria, Australia. http://www.epress.monash.edu.au/. : 25–26. DOI:10.2104/mbr08006

About the author

Pi-Shen Seet

Pi-Shen Seet is a lecturer in Organisation Behaviour and Entrepreneurship at the Adelaide Graduate School of Business, University of Adelaide.


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